COSMOS: Three-dimensional Weak Lensing and the Growth of Structure

By Richard J. Massey, Jason D. Rhodes, A. Leauthaud, P. Capak, Richard S. Ellis, A. Koekemoer, Alexandre Refregier, N. Scoville, James E. Taylor, J. Albert and 10 more. 2007

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a three-dimensional cosmic shear analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS survey, the largest ever optical imaging program performed in space. We have measured the shapes of galaxies for the telltale distortions caused by weak gravitational lensing and traced the growth of that signal as a function of redshift. Using both 2D and 3D analyses, we measure cosmological parameters Ωm, the density of matter in the universe, and σ8, the normalization of the matter power spectrum. The introduction of redshift information tightens the constraints by a factor of 3 and also reduces the relative sampling (or "cosmic") variance compared to recent surveys that may be larger but are only two-dimensional. From the 3D analysis, we find that σ8(Ωm/0.3)0.44 = 0.866 at 68% confidence limits, including both statistical and potential systematic sources of error in the total budget. Indeed, the absolute calibration of shear measurement methods is now the dominant source of uncertainty. Assuming instead a baseline cosmology to fix the geometry of the universe, we have measured the growth of structure on both linear and nonlinear physical scales. Our results thus demonstrate a proof of concept for tomographic analysis techniques that have been proposed for future weak-lensing surveys by a dedicated wide-field telescope in space.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1eb2c3ab7d2043e128603a3f4af2d79ee65e1325

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. L. Hernquist
2. Volker Springel
3. M. Vogelsberger
4. H. Hoekstra
5. P. Hopkins
6. Shy Genel
7. P. Torrey
8. D. Nelson

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. H. Hoekstra
2. Y. Mellier
3. C. Hirata
4. M. Ishak
5. M. Troxel
6. Catherine Heymans
7. L. Waerbeke
8. T. Erben

Citations in the corpus

• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: cosmological parameters from three seasons of data (2013, unknown): “…al. 2011), galaxy cluster measurements (e.g., Vikhlinin et al. 2009; Mantz et al. 2010; Rozo et al. 2010; Tinker et al. 2012) and observations of gravitational lensing (e.g., Massey et al. 2007; Fu et al. 2008; Schrabback et al. 2010; Suyu et al. 2010; Heymans et al. 2012; Kil-binger et al. 2013).”
• Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, methodology): “Several wide-field optical surveys were ongoing at the time, including the deep 170 deg2 CFHT Legacy Survey (for which cosmic shear was a key science driver) and the very deep multiwavelength COSMOS survey with high-resolution optical imaging from HST/ACS (Massey et al., 2007b; Schrabback et al., 20”
• Cosmological constraints from the 100-deg2 weak-lensing survey (2007, methodology): “With the recent first measurements of a changing lensing signal as a function of redshift (Bacon et al. 2005; Wittman 2005; Semboloni et al. 2006; Massey et al. 2007b), and the first weak-lensing constraints on dark energy (Hoekstra et al. 2006; Jarvis et al. 2006; Kitching et al. 2007; Schimd et…”
• The Intrinsic Alignment of Galaxies and its Impact on Weak Gravitational Lensing in an Era of Precision Cosmology (2014, background): “…et al., 1983; Bonnet and Mellier, 1995; Kaiser et al., 1995; Luppino and Kaiser, 1997; Kuijken, 1999; Bacon et al., 2001; Kaiser, 2000; Erben et al., 2001; Bernstein and Jarvis, 2002; van Waerbeke and Mellier, 2003; Hirata and Seljak, 2003; Refregier, 2003a; Jain et al., 2006; Massey et al., 2007).”
• Pixel-based correction for Charge Transfer Inefficiency in the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys (2009, methodology): “We use the algorithm by Rhodes, Refregier & Groth (2000), as implemented by Leauthaud et al. (2007) and Massey et al. (2007a), to recover the underlying galaxy ellipticities.”
• Weak Gravitational Lensing (2012, methodology): “Recently, the COSMOS survey [59, 60] has enabled to reconstruct the first 3D weak lensing map.”
• Strong-lensing optical depths in a ΛCDM universe – II. The influence of the stellar mass in galaxies (2007, background): “Surveys measuring the weak lensing effects of the matter distribution as a whole (e.g. Semboloni et al. 2006; Hoekstra et al. 2006; Simon et al. 2007; Massey et al. 2007a; Benjamin et al. 2007; Fu et al. 2008) are particularly promising for further constraining the parameters of the ΛCDM model.”
• Evidence of the accelerated expansion of the Universe from weak lensing tomography with COSMOS (2009, methodology): “Note that the analysis of Massey et al. (2007c) yields tighter statistical errors, which may be a result of their covariance estimate from the variation between the four COSMOS quadrants.”
• KiDS-450: cosmological parameter constraints from tomographic weak gravitational lensing (2016, methodology): “An alternative method removes angular scales from the analysis where the B modes are found to be non-zero (Massey et al. 2007; Fu et al. 2008).”