The low redshift survey at calar alto (LoRCA)

The Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) feature in the power spectrum of galaxies provides a standard ruler to measure the accelerated expansion of the Universe. To extract all available information about dark energy, it is necessary to measure a standard ruler in the local, z < 0.2, universe where dark energy dominates most the energy density of the Universe. Though the volume available in the local universe is limited, it is just big enough to measure accurately the long 100 h^-1 Mpc wave-mode of the BAO. Using cosmological N-body simulations and approximate methods based on Lagrangian perturbation theory, we construct a suite of a thousand light-cones to evaluate the precision at which one can measure the BAO standard ruler in the local universe. We find that using the most massive galaxies on the full sky (34 000 deg²), i.e. a K_2MASS < 14 magnitude-limited sample, one can measure the BAO scale up to a precision of 4 per cent (~1.2 per cent using reconstruction). We also find that such a survey would help to detect the dynamics of dark energy. Therefore, we propose a 3-year long observational project, named the Low Redshift survey at Calar Alto, to observe spectroscopically about 200 000 galaxies in the northern sky to contribute to the construction of aforementioned galaxy sample. The suite of light-cones is made available to the public.