The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed tomeasure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in theclustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts ofall previous spectroscopic surveys of large-scale structure. BOSS uses1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i = 19.9 over 10,000deg² to measure BAO to redshifts z 0.7. Observations ofneutral hydrogen in the Lyα forest in more than 150,000 quasarspectra (g 22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15 3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of thelarge-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Lyα forest and astrong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in theclustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. Weproject that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter