2MASS Photometric Redshift catalog: a comprehensive three-dimensional census of the whole sky

Key cosmological applications require the three-dimensional galaxy distribution on the entire celestial sphere. These include measuring the gravitational pull on the Local Group, estimating the large-scale bulk flow and testing the Copernican principle. However, the largest all-sky redshift surveys -- the 2MRS and IRAS PSCz -- have median redshifts of only z=0.03 and sample the very local Universe. There exist all-sky galaxy catalogs reaching much deeper -- SuperCOSMOS in the optical, 2MASS in the near-IR and WISE in the mid-IR -- but these lack complete redshift information. At present, the only rapid way towards larger 3D catalogs covering the whole sky is through photometric redshift techniques. In this paper we present the 2MASS Photometric Redshift catalog (2MPZ) containing 1 million galaxies, constructed by cross-matching 2MASS XSC, WISE and SuperCOSMOS all-sky samples and employing the artificial neural network approach (the ANNz algorithm), trained on such redshift surveys as SDSS, 6dFGS and 2dFGRS. The derived photometric redshifts have errors nearly independent of distance, with an all-sky accuracy of sigma_z=0.015 and a very small percentage of outliers. In this way, we obtain redshift estimates with a typical precision of 12% for all the 2MASS XSC galaxies that lack spectroscopy. In addition, we have made an early effort towards probing the entire 3D sky beyond 2MASS, by pairing up WISE with SuperCOSMOS and training the ANNz on GAMA redshift data reaching currently to z_med~0.2. This has yielded photo-z accuracies comparable to those in the 2MPZ. These all-sky photo-z catalogs, with a median z~0.1 for the 2MPZ, and significantly deeper for future WISE-based samples, will be the largest and most complete of their kind for the foreseeable future.

Precision cosmology with the 2MASS clustering dipole

Comparison of peculiar velocities of galaxies with their gravitational accelerations (induced by the density field) is one of the methods to constrain the redshift distortion parameter beta=(Omega_m^0.55)/b, where Omega_m is the non-relativistic matter density parameter and b is the linear bias. In particular, one can use the motion of the Local Group (LG) for that purpose. Its peculiar velocity is known from the dipole component of the cosmic microwave background, whereas its acceleration can be estimated with the use of an all-sky galaxy catalog, from the so-called clustering dipole. At the moment, the biggest dataset of that kind is the Two Micron All Sky Survey Extended Source Catalog (2MASS XSC) containing almost 1 million galaxies and complete up to ~300 Mpc/h. We applied 2MASS data to measure LG acceleration and used two methods to estimate the beta parameter. Both of them yield beta~0.4 with an error of several per cent, which is the most precise determination of this parameter from the clustering dipole to date.

The velocity-density relation in the spherical model

We study the cosmic velocity-density relation using the spherical collapse model (SCM) as a proxy to non-linear dynamics. Although the dependence of this relation on cosmological parameters is known to be weak, we retain the density parameter Omega_m in SCM equations, in order to study the limit Omega_m -> 0. We show that in this regime the considered relation is strictly linear, for arbitrary values of the density contrast, on the contrary to some claims in the literature. On the other hand, we confirm that for realistic values of Omega_m the exact relation in the SCM is well approximated by the classic formula of Bernardeau (1992), both for voids (delta<0) and for overdensities up to delta ~ 3. Inspired by this fact, we find further analytic approximations to the relation for the whole range delta from -1 to infinity. Our formula for voids accounts for the weak Omega_m-dependence of their maximal rate of expansion, which for Omega_m < 1 is slightly smaller that 3/2. For positive density contrasts, we find a simple relation div v = 3 H_0 (Omega_m)^(0.6) [ (1+delta)^(1/6) - (1+delta)^(1/2) ], that works very well up to the turn-around (i.e. up to delta ~ 13.5 for Omega_m = 0.25 and neglected Omega_Lambda). Having the same second-order expansion as the formula of Bernardeau, it can be regarded as an extension of the latter for higher density contrasts. Moreover, it gives a better fit to results of cosmological numerical simulations.