The DES Science Verification weak lensing shear catalogues

By Michael J. Jarvis, Erin Sheldon, Joe Zuntz, Tomasz Kacprzak, Sarah Bridle, Adam Amara, R. Armstrong, Matthew R. Becker, G. Bernstein, C. Bonnett and 85 more. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2015

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present weak lensing shear catalogues for 139 square degrees of data taken during the Science Verification (SV) time for the new Dark Energy Camera (DECam) being used for the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We describe our object selection, point spread function estimation and shear measurement procedures using two independent shear pipelines, IM3SHAPE and NGMIX, which produce catalogues of 2.12 million and 3.44 million galaxies respectively. We detail a set of null tests for the shear measurements and find that they pass the requirements for systematic errors at the level necessary for weak lensing science applications using the SV data. We also discuss some of the planned algorithmic improvements that will be necessary to produce sufficiently accurate shear catalogues for the full 5-year DES, which is expected to cover 5000 square degrees.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8531b6d82ef97459f498c20ab9e8a7692911cb86

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

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

Stellar Streams Discovered in the Dark Energy Survey (2018, methodology): “To circumvent this issue, we used ngmix2 (Sheldon 2014; Jarvis et al. 2016; DrlicaWagner et al. 2017) to fit the flux and morphology of each source over all individual single-epoch images simultaneously.”
The first-year shear catalog of the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program Survey (2017, methodology): “Selection biases due to the quantities used for selecting galaxies (Section 5.1) correlating with the shear and/or PSF anisotropy can be a highly significant source of selection bias in ensemble shear estimation (e.g., Hirata et al. 2004; Mandelbaum et al. 2005; Jarvis et al. 2016).”
Practical Weak-lensing Shear Measurement with Metacalibration (2017, methodology): “Using paired galaxies has the undesired effect of cancelling some biases that we wish to explore (Jarvis et al. 2016).”
Cosmology from cosmic shear power spectra with Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam first-year data (2018, methodology): “In particular, the impact of PSF model shape errors on the shear two-point correlations depends on the size distribution of the galaxies compared to the PSF, which we call “resolution” (see, e.g., Section 3.4 of Jarvis et al. 2016).”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: weak lensing mass calibration of redMaPPer galaxy clusters (2018, result): “While the Y1 data is shallower than the DES SV data, improvements in the shear estimation pipelines and overall data quality enabled us to reach a number density of sources similar to that from DES SV data (Jarvis et al. 2016).”
KiDS-450: The tomographic weak lensing power spectrum and constraints on cosmological parameters (2017, methodology): “In a second step we apply a large but realistic additive term of c = 2 × 10−3 (e.g. Jarvis et al. 2016; fig.”
The Hyper Suprime-Cam Software Pipeline (2017, methodology): “Like DES, KiDS, and LSST, many of HSC’s science goals are cosmological; we seek to measure the distribution and evolution of structure in the universe and use these to infer the properties of dark matter and dark energy.”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: The Photometric Data Set for Cosmology (2017, methodology): “We used the ngmix18 code (Sheldon 2014; Sheldon & Huff 2017; Jarvis et al. 2016) to reanalyze pixel-level data from multi-epoch postage stamps of each object in the Y1A1 GOLD coadd catalog.”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: redshift distributions of the weak-lensing source galaxies (2017, methodology): “Fluxes used as input to the photo-z programs for both shear catalogues are derived using NGMIX2 (Sheldon 2014; Jarvis et al. 2016), which fits a model to the pixel values of each galaxy in the GOLD catalogue.”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: weak lensing shape catalogues (2017, methodology): “The DES shape measurement methodology in the DES-SV period was exhaustively detailed in Jarvis et al. (2016), hereafter J16.”
KiDS-450: cosmological parameter constraints from tomographic weak gravitational lensing (2016, methodology): “Following Jarvis et al. (2016), we also use the image simulations to explicitly look at the print-through of the PSF shape in the galaxy shape by modelling the bias as γ obsj = (1 + mj )γ truej + αje j + cj .”