Potential sources of contamination to weak lensing measurements: constraints from N-body simulations

By Catherine Heymans, M. White, Alan Heavens, C. Vale, L. Waerbeke. 2006

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We investigate the expected correlation between the weak gravitational shear of distant galaxies and the orientation of foreground galaxies, throu gh the use of numerical simulations. This shear-ellipticity correlation can mimic a cosmological weak lensing signal, and is potentially the limiting physical systematic effect for cosmolo gy with future high-precision weak lensing surveys. We find that, if uncorrected, the shear-ell ipticity correlation could contribute up to 10% of the weak lensing signal on scales up to 20 arcminutes, for lensing surveys with a median depth zm = 1. The most massive foreground galaxies are expected to cause the largest correlations, a result also seen in the Sloan Digital Sky Sur vey. We find that the redshift dependence of the effect is proportional to the lensing efficie ncy of the foreground, and this offers prospects for removal to high precision, although with some model dependence. The contamination is characterised by a weakly negative B-mode, which can be used as a diagnostic of systematic errors. We also provide more accurate predictions for a second potential source of error, the intrinsic alignment of nearby galaxies . This source of contamination is less important, however, as it can be easily removed with distance information.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e933eb6f338b7e2e2aa01897de78e0849aeebc58

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Citations in the corpus

A Cosmological Framework for the Co-Evolution of Quasars, Supermassive Black Holes, and Elliptical Galaxies. I. Galaxy Mergers and Quasar Activity (2007, background): “…parameters (in terms of mass, or relative to L ) with redshift (Yan et al. 2003; Cooray 2005; Conroy et al. 2006), or equivalently that the masses of galaxies hosted in a halo of a given mass are primarily a function of that halo mass and not of redshift (Heymans et al. 2006; Conroy et al. 2007).”
DISSIPATION AND EXTRA LIGHT IN GALACTIC NUCLEI. IV. EVOLUTION IN THE SCALING RELATIONS OF SPHEROIDS (2008, background): “…terms of mass, or relative toL∗) with redshift (Yan et al. 2003; Cooray 2005; Conroy et al. 2006; Brown et al. 2008), or equivalently that the masses of galaxies hosted in a halo of a given mass are primarily a function of that halo mass, not of redshift (Heymans et al. 2006; Conroy et al. 2007).”
KiDS-450: cosmological parameter constraints from tomographic weak gravitational lensing (2016, methodology): “The intrinsic galaxy alignment models and mocks which find significant B modes measure them to be less than ∼1/5th of the intrinsic alignment contribution to the E mode (Heymans et al. 2006b; Giahi-Saravani & Schäfer 2014).”
COSMOS: Three-dimensional Weak Lensing and the Growth of Structure (2007, methodology): “See Heymans et al. (2006) orMassey et al. (2007) for the definitions of the multiplicative hmi and additive hci shear errors.”
Ray-tracing through the Millennium Simulation: Born corrections and lens-lens coupling in cosmic shear and galaxy-galaxy lensing (2008, methodology): “In a simpler approach (e.g. White & Vale 2004; Heymans et al. 2006; Hilbert et al. 2007a), the matter in the N-body simulation is projected along unperturbed light paths onto a single lens plane, which is then used to calculate lensing observables.”
GALAXY CLUSTERING IN THE NEWFIRM MEDIUM BAND SURVEY: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STELLAR MASS AND DARK MATTER HALO MASS AT 1 < z < 2 (2010, methodology): “…(e.g. Auger et al. 2010) and weak (e.g. Mandelbaum et al. 2006) gravitational lensing, while effective techniques, are observationally expensive and have thus mainly been used for galaxies in the local universe, with only a few studies up to z ∼ 1 (e.g. Heymans et al. 2006; Conroy et al. 2007).”
Galaxy clustering in the CFHTLS-Wide: the changing relationship between galaxies and haloes since z ~ 1.2 (2011, methodology): “Several methodologies exist to estimate halo masses: for example, using satellite kinematics (More et al. 2011), X-ray temperatures (Peterson & Fabian 2006; Cattaneo et al. 2009), or gravitational lensing (Heymans et al. 2006; Mandelbaum et al. 2006; Auger et al. 2010; Leauthaud et al. 2012b).”
NEW CONSTRAINTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR-TO-DARK MATTER CONNECTION: A COMBINED ANALYSIS OF GALAXY–GALAXY LENSING, CLUSTERING, AND STELLAR MASS FUNCTIONS FROM z = 0.2 to z = 1 (2011, methodology): “First, Heymans et al. (2006a) fit an NFW profile to the g–g lensing signal and so the masses that they measure will reflect the mean halo mass at fixed stellar mass, 25 For example, the UltraVista survey of the COSMOS field will obtain IR imaging to Y = 26.7, J = 26.6, H = 26.1, and Ks = 25.6 mag,…”
CFHTLenS: the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey – imaging data and catalogue products (2012, methodology): “This would be an unwanted side-effect of any model fitting code that does not attempt to correct for this effect, and indeed is something which is also seen in non-model fitting shape measurement methods (Heymans et al. 2006a).”
Dark energy constraints from cosmic shear power spectra: impact of intrinsic alignments on photometric redshift requirements (2007, methodology): “…Alignment Model We now investigate the impact of tighter constraints on the intrinsic alignment modeling, that could come from observations like those of Mandelbaum et al. (2006); Hirata et al. (2007) or advances in theoretical predictions (e.g. Heymans et al. 2006b; van den Bosch et al. 2002).”
Constraints on intrinsic alignment contamination of weak lensing surveys using the MegaZ-LRG sample (2010, methodology): “The underlying correlations between halo shapes or orientations and the surrounding matter structure have been d - tected on a large range of mass scales in simulations (Bailin& Steinmetz 2005; Altay et al. 2006; Heymans et al. 2006; Kuhlen et al. 2007).”
CFHTLenS: Improving the quality of photometric redshifts with precision photometry (2011, background): “…2011) and groups (Hoekstra et al. 2001; Parker et al. 2005; Leauthaud et al. 2010) or even galaxies (e.g. Brainerd et al. 1996; Hudson et al. 1998; Hoekstra et al. 2004; Heymans et al. 2006; Mandelbaum et al. 2006; Parker et al. 2007; Leauthaud et al. 2011; van Uitert et al. 2011) can be studied.”
Intrinsic alignments of SDSS-III BOSS LOWZ sample galaxies (2014, background): “Several studies have concentrated on studying intrinsic alignments of dark matter halos in cosmological simulations (for example, Croft & Metzler 2000; Heymans et al. 2006; Faltenbacher et al. 2008; Kang et al. 2007; Kuhlen, Diemand & Madau 2007).”
Evidence of the accelerated expansion of the Universe from weak lensing tomography with COSMOS (2009, methodology): “Redshift information is additionally required to eliminate potential contaminat on of the lensing signal from intrinsic galaxy alignments (e.g. King & Schneider 2002; Hirata & Seljak 2004; Heymans et al. 2006b; Joachimi & Schneider 2008).”
CFHTLenS: testing the laws of gravity with tomographic weak lensing and redshift-space distortions (2012, methodology): “The choice to use only two broad high redshift bins in this tomographic analysis was motivated by the desire to mitigate the impact of intrinsic galaxy alignments on the tomographic measurements (see for example Heymans et al. 2006; Joachimi et al. 2011, and references therein).”
Galaxy clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing: a promising union to constrain cosmological parameters (2008, background): “…(e.g. Griffiths et al. 1996; Hudson et al. 1998; McKay et al. 2001; Guzik & Seljak 2002; Hoekstra et al. 2003; Hoekstra, Yee & Gladders 2004; Sheldon et al. 2004, 2007a,b; Heymans et al. 2006; Mandelbaum et al. 2006; Johnston et al. 2007; Parker et al. 2007; Mandelbaum, Seljak & Hirata 2008).”
A Cosmological Framework for the Co-Evolution of Quasars, Supermassive Black Holes, and Elliptical Galaxies. II. Formation of Red Ellipticals (2007, background): “…parameters (in terms of mass, or relative to L ) with redshift (Yan et al. 2003; Cooray 2005; Conroy et al. 2006), or equivalently that the masses of galaxies hosted in a halo of a given mass are primarily a function of that halo mass, not of redshift (Heymans et al. 2006a; Conroy et al. 2007).”
The Hierarchical Build-Up of Massive Galaxies and the Intracluster Light since z = 1 (2007, background): “…on halo masses at various epochs which indicate that while the stellar and dark matter components grow in lockstep for lower mass systems (Heymans et al. 2006; Conroy et al. 2007), the stellar mass growth of central galaxies in high-mass halos appears to be outpaced by the growth in…”