Deciphering cosmological information from redshift surveys of high-z objects - the cosmological light-cone effect and redshift-space distortion -

Abstract

The three-dimensional distribution of astronomical objects observed in redshift space significantly differs from the true distribution since the distance to each object cannot be determined by its redshift $z$ only; for $z \ll 1$ the peculiar velocity field contaminates the true recession velocity of the Hubble flow, while the true distance for objects at $z < 1$ sensitively depends on the (unknown and thus assumed) cosmological parameters. This hampers the effort to understand the true distribution of large-scale structure of the universe. In addition, all cosmological observations are carried out on a light-cone, the null hypersurface of an observer at $z=0$. This implies that their intrinsic properties and clustering statistics should change even within the survey volume. Therefore a proper comparison taking account of the light-cone effect is important to extract any cosmological information from redshift catalogues, especially for $z < 1$. We present recent theoretical development on the two effects -- the cosmological light-cone effect and the cosmological redshift-space distortion -- which should play key roles in observational cosmology in the 21st century.