Studying the Expansion of the Universe with BOSS quasars
After six years of observations, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) ended last summer, and will soon make its data public (SDSS Data Release 12). During these years, it has used the SDSS telescope to obtain spectra of 1.5 million galaxies to get very accurate measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) scale at redshift z ~0.5. At the same time, BOSS observed over 184 000 high redshift quasars (z>2.15) with the goal of detecting the BAO feature in the clustering of the intergalactic medium, using a technique known as the Lyman alpha forest (LyaF). In this talk I will overview several results from the LyaF working group in BOSS, including the measurement of BAO at z=2.4 both from the auto-correlation of the LyaF (Delubac et al. 2014), and from its cross-correlation with quasars (Font-Ribera et al. 2014). From the combination of these studies we are able to measure the expansion rate of the Universe 11 billion years ago with a 2% uncertainty.
