baryon acoustic feature

It's a feature, people, not an oscillation. Jeremy Tinker (NYU) gave a great brown-bag today at the blackboard about the measurement of the baryon acoustic feature in the Lyman-alpha forest at redshift 2.3 from SDSS-III BOSS. This is a great piece of work, to which my only significant contribution was quasar target selection with Bovy. The baryon acoustic feature position is consistent with the standard model of cosmology (unfortunately) but the result is beautiful and represents a lot of work by a lot of people. Congratulations, BOSS: A great project making fundamental discoveries (and on budget and on time). I spent the afternoon talking radio with Van Velzen (Amsterdam) and Atlas with Mykytyn and Patel.