NCSA staff who would like to submit an item for the calendar can email newsdesk@ncsa.illinois.edu.
Galaxy redshift surveys that map the large-scale structure of the Universe contain a vast amount of information. Measurements of the clustering of galaxies and the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation feature imprinted within it have delivered major advances in cosmology over the last 20 years. I will describe exciting new methods that have recently been developed to extract even more information from these datasets. Two closely related methods are based on analysing the clustering separately in regions of different background density – I will discuss in particular information from anisotropies in the distribution of galaxies around low-density regions known as cosmic voids. The third method is based on advances in modelling correlations in the Lyman-alpha forest absorption from very high redshift quasars. I will present current results from these methods applied to the latest available data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and discuss ongoing work for these measurements in the next generation surveys DESI and Euclid.