Detection of correlated galaxy ellipticities on CFHT data: first evidence for gravitational lensing by large-scale structures

By L. Waerbeke, Y. Mellier, T. Erben, J. Cuillandre, F. Bernardeau, R. Maoli, E. Bertin, H. M. Cracken, O. L. Fèvre, B. Fort and 3 more. 2000

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We report the detection of a significant (5.5 sigma) excess of correlations between galaxy ellipticities at scales ranging from 0.5 to 3.5 arc-minutes. This detection of a gravitational lensing signal by large-scale structure was made using a composite high quality imaging survey of 6300 arcmin^2 obtained at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) with the UH8K and CFH12K panoramic CCD cameras. The amplitude of the excess correlation is 2.2\pm 0.2 % at 1 arcmin scale, in agreement with theoretical predictions of the lensing effect induced by large-scale structure.We provide a quantitative analysis of systematics which could contribute to the signal and show that the net effect is small and can be corrected for. We show that the measured ellipticity correlations behave as expected for a gravitational shear signal. The relatively small size of our survey precludes tight constraints on cosmological models. However the data are in favor of cluster normalized cosmological models, and marginally reject Cold Dark Matter models with (Omega=0.3, sigma_8<0.6) or (Omega=1, sigma_8=1). The detection of cosmic shear demonstrates the technical feasibility of using weak lensing surveys to measure dark matter clustering and the potential for cosmological parameter measurements, in particular with upcoming wide field CCD cameras.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a85e1aff5b9931c14e0edd6c9b9d31c2bcebf203

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Citations in the corpus

Dark energy constraints from cosmic shear power spectra: impact of intrinsic alignments on photometric redshift requirements (2007, background): “L. Van Waerbeke, Y. Mellier, T. Erben, J. C. Cuillandre, F. Bernardeau, R. Maoli, E. Bertin, H. J. Mc Cracken, O. Le Fèvre, B. Fort, et al., A&A 358, 30 (2000), astro-ph/0002500.”
Gravitational lensing (2010, background): “The breakthrough came soon thereafter, when several different groups almost simultaneously reported the measurement of the cosmic shear correlation function [11, 306, 487, 507].”
Galaxy Alignments: Observations and Impact on Cosmology (2015, background): “By combining with the results for some lower-redshift blue galaxy samples from SDSS that were previously presented in Mandelbaum et al. (2006a), the null detection was used to place upper limits on how blue galaxy intrinsic alignments could contaminate weak lensing measurements from a CFHTLenS-like ”
Weak Gravitational Lensing by Large-Scale Structure (2003, background): “Within a few weeks, four independent groups (Bacon, Refregier & Ellis 2000; Kaiser, Wilson & Luppino 2000; van Waerbeke et al. 2000; Wittman et al. 2000) reported the first firm statistical detections of cosmic shear using three different 4m-class telescopes: the Cerro Tololo Inter-American…”
Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe (2008, unknown): “Detection of this cosmic shear signal was first announced by four groups in 2000 (Bacon, Refregier & Ellis 2000; Kaiser, Wilson & Luppino 2000; Van Waerbeke et al. 2000; Wittman et al. 2000).”
How accurately can we measure weak gravitational shear (2000, background): “Very recently, the cosmic shear was also detected (Schneider et al. 1998a, van Waerbeke et al. 2000, Bacon et al. 2000a, Wittmann et al. 2000, Kaiser et al. 2000).”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, unknown): “Over the same period, several additional square degrees were observed with long exposure times in excellent seeing using ground-based telescopes (Van Waerbeke et al., 2001, 2002; Bacon et al., 2003; Hamana et al., 2003).”
Galaxy Alignments: An Overview (2015, background): “…al. (2001) was part of a suite of works which were contemporaneous with the first detections of cosmic shear (Bacon et al. 2000; Kaiser et al. 2000; Van Waerbeke et al. 2000; Wittman et al. 2000) and which established a link between the old field of galaxy alignments and the novel, promising…”
The Intrinsic Alignment of Galaxies and its Impact on Weak Gravitational Lensing in an Era of Precision Cosmology (2014, background): “…Ia) (Guy et al., 2010; Conley et al., 2011; Sullivan et al., 2011; Suzuki et al., 2012), and weak gravitational lensing (Bacon et al., 2000; van Waerbeke et al., 2000; Rhodes et al., 2001; Hoekstra et al., 2002; van Waerbeke et al., 2002; Brown et al., 2003; Jarvis et al., 2003; Massey et al.,…”