Abstract:

In this talk, I will focus on the first cosmological constraints utilizing the "standard ruler" of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature as detected in the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) from the SDSS-III project. I will discuss the cosmological constraints and the context of these results with previous measurements to construct a cosmic distance ladder. This data release (DR9) is the largest sample of galaxy redshift data ever used to constrain the BAO, covering an effective volume of 2.2 cubic gigaparsecs with 264,283 massive galaxies. I will briefly review our joint analysis of both the correlation function and power spectrum where we identify the BAO feature at a significance of over 5 sigma, yielding a BAO position to 1.7% accuracy. We use a series of detailed mock galaxy catalogs to justify our methods, including the application of density reconstruction to fully harness the statistical power of the data. Finally, I will comment on some plans for future BOSS analyses.