The Galaxy-Mass Correlation Function Measured from Weak Lensing in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

By Erin Sheldon, D. Johnston, Joshua A. Frieman, R. Scranton, T. McKay, Andrew J. Connolly, Tamás Budavári, Idit Zehavi, N. Bahcall, J. Brinkmann and 1 more. 2003

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We present galaxy-galaxy lensing measurements over scales 0.025 to 10 h-1 Mpc in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Using a flux-limited sample of 127,001 lens galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts and mean luminosity ⟨L⟩ ∼ L* and 9,020,388 source galaxies with photometric redshifts, we invert the lensing signal to obtain the galaxy-mass correlation function ξgm. We find ξgm is consistent with a power law, ξgm = (r/r0)-γ, with best-fit parameters γ = 1.79 ± 0.06 and r0 = (5.4 ± 0.7)(0.27/Ωm)1/γ h-1 Mpc. At fixed separation, the ratio ξgg/ξgm = b/r, where b is the bias and r is the correlation coefficient. Comparing with the galaxy autocorrelation function for a similarly selected sample of SDSS galaxies, we find that b/r is approximately scale-independent over scales 0.2–6.7 h-1 Mpc, with mean ⟨b/r⟩ = (1.3 ± 0.2)(Ωm/0.27). We also find no scale dependence in b/r for a volume-limited sample of luminous galaxies (-23.0 < Mr < -21.5). The mean b/r for this sample is ⟨b/r⟩Vlim = (2.0 ± 0.7)(Ωm/0.27). We split the lens galaxy sample into subsets based on luminosity, color, spectral type, and velocity dispersion and see clear trends of the lensing signal with each of these parameters. The amplitude and logarithmic slope of ξgm increase with galaxy luminosity. For high luminosities (L ∼ 5 L*), ξgm deviates significantly from a power law. These trends with luminosity also appear in the subsample of red galaxies, which are more strongly clustered than blue galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/33e0f26b863e1fd7e1b46acd17cc3c6a120dbe77

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Citations in the corpus

Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: redshift distributions of the weak-lensing source galaxies (2017, methodology): “We note that for other uses of the shape catalogues, such as with the optimal estimator (Sheldon et al. 2004), the effective weights of sources could be different, which has to be accounted for in the photo-z calibration.”
Gravitational lensing (2010, background): “The authors of [448] studied the cross-correlation between galaxies and mass from the galaxy–galaxy lensing signal detected in SDSS data.”
Systematic errors in weak lensing: application to SDSS galaxy-galaxy weak lensing (2005, methodology): “…Blandford & Smail 1996; Hudson et al. 1998; Fischer et al. 2000; McKay et al. 2001; Smith et al. 2001; Guzik & Seljak 2002; Hoekstra et al. 2003; Sheldon et al. 2004; Hoekstra, Yee & Gladders 2004; Seljak et al. 2005), the tangential shear distortion around galaxies due to their dark E-mail:…”
Detection of large-scale intrinsic ellipticity—density correlation from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and implications for weak lensing surveys (2005, methodology): “(16) is identical with the usual random catalog subtraction procedure in galaxy-galaxy lensing studies (Sheldon et al. 2004; c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 Mandelbaum et al. 2005a).”
Lensing is Low: Cosmology, Galaxy Formation, or New Physics? (2016, methodology): “A boost correction factor is sometimes applied in order to account for the dilution of the signal by physically associated sources (e.g. Kneib et al. 2003; Hirata et al. 2004; Sheldon et al. 2004; Mandelbaum et al. 2006b).”
Weak Lensing Measurement of the Mass--Richness Relation of SDSS redMaPPer Clusters (2016, methodology): “(4) The optimal weights wi above include both the per-object shape noise weighting wi,shape and the critical surface mass density (Sheldon et al. 2004b), wi = Σ −2 cr wi,shape, (5) where wi,shape = 1/(σ 2 int + σ 2 i ) includes both intrinsic shape noise and measurement uncertainty.”
Improving Cosmological Distance Measurements by Reconstruction of the Baryon Acoustic Peak (2006, background): “This is well established by the simple behavior of bias (e.g. Tegmark et al. 2004), the detection of large-scale redshift distortions (e.g. Peacock et al. 2001), and the galaxy-mass crosscorrelation measured from weak lensing (Sheldon et al. 2003).”
Virial Masses and the Baryon Fraction in Galaxies (2005, methodology): “More recently, McKay et al. (2001) used the available SDSS redshift information to study the galaxy-galaxy lensing signal as a function of galaxy properties (also see Guzik & Seljak 2002; Seljak 2002; Sheldon et al. 2004).”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: weak lensing mass calibration of redMaPPer galaxy clusters (2018, background): “Sheldon et al. (2004) show that the minimum variance estimator for the weak lensing signal is ̃ = lens∑ j src∑ i wi,j eT; i,j /〈 −1crit〉i,j∑ j,i wi,j , (10) where the summation goes over all source–lens pairs in some radius bin and eT; i,j is the tangential component of the ellipticity of source i…”