We need to find:

1) Estimated frequency of the emission line galaxies (This will be the NVO project). 2) S/N and spectral resolving power requirements to reach errors in z equal to 0.01*(1+z). 3) Size of the survey needed to complete the galaxy correlations.

From these we can compute the telescope size and survey time required. (also of interest: could this telescope be used with an external occulter for finding and characterizing terrestrial planets).

Some Background:

Eisenstein et al, "DETECTION OF THE BARYON ACOUSTIC PEAK IN THE LARGE-SCALE CORRELATION FUNCTION OF SDSS LUMINOUS RED GALAXIES" used 46,748 luminous red galaxies from the SDSS to find a slight excess of galaxies with separations of 500 million light years.

http://www.sdss.org/news/releases/20050111.yardstick.html

This weeks project:

Estimate fraction of galaxies with height of the H-alpha emission line greater than N times the continuum level for varying values of N.

Search the registry for other sources that examinied emission line galaxies and analyze depending on what information is available (eg. GOODS survey)

-- DonLindler - 11 Sep 2006