Forward Modeling of Spectroscopic Galaxy Surveys: Application to SDSS

TL;DR

This paper introduces Uspec, a forward modeling tool for generating realistic galaxy spectra, validated against SDSS data, to aid in interpreting current and future spectroscopic galaxy surveys.

Contribution

We demonstrate the application of Uspec to simulate SDSS LRG spectra, achieving good statistical agreement and paving the way for improved modeling of upcoming surveys.

Findings

Simulated spectra match SDSS data well overall.

Principal Component Analysis shows good agreement between simulated and real spectra.

Differences are mainly due to intrinsic galaxy properties, not modeling inaccuracies.

Abstract

Galaxy spectra are essential to probe the spatial distribution of galaxies in our Universe. To better interpret current and future spectroscopic galaxy redshift surveys, it is important to be able to simulate these data sets. We describe Uspec, a forward modeling tool to generate galaxy spectra taking into account some intrinsic galaxy properties as well as instrumental responses of a given telescope. The model for the intrinsic properties of the galaxy population, i.e., the luminosity functions, and size and spectral coefficients distribu- tions, was developed in an earlier work for broad-band imaging surveys [1], and we now aim to test the model further using spectroscopic data. We apply Uspec to the SDSS/CMASS sample of Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs). We construct selection cuts that match those used to build this LRG sample, which we then apply to data and simulations in the same way. The resulting real and simulated average spectra show a good statistical agreement overall, with residual differences likely coming from a bluer galaxy population of the simulated sam- ple. We also do not explore the impact of non-solar element ratios in our simulations. For a quantitative comparison, we perform Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the sets of spectra. By comparing the PCs constructed from simulations and data, we find good agree- ment for all components. The distributions of the eigencoefficients also show an appreciable overlap. We are therefore able to properly simulate the LRG sample taking into account the SDSS/BOSS instrumental responses. The differences between the two samples can be ascribed to the intrinsic properties of the simulated galaxy population, which can be reduced by further improvements of our modelling method in the future. We discuss how these results can be useful for the forward modeling of upcoming large spectroscopic surveys.