Abstract

At any given scale and time, standard analyses of the large-scale structure of the Universe only extract 3 numbers from the cosmic galaxy density and matter density fluctuations: their two variances and their covariance. In the late Universe, these 3 numbers are smooth functions of time and scale and lead to featureless signals that only poorly distinguish between between cosmological signatures and signatures of poorly understood astrophysics, poorly understood non-linear dynamics and systematic effects. In the talk I will demonstrate how to lift these limitations by analysing the full shape of the joint probability distribution function (PDF) of galaxy density and matter density fluctuations. I will also introduce the publicly available software toolkit CosMomentum which has been developed in Cambridge and is able to analyse the full shape of this PDF in realistic data.