Galaxy–galaxy weak lensing in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: intrinsic alignments and shear calibration errors

By C. Hirata, Rachel Mandelbaum, Uros Seljak, J. Guzik, Nikhil Padmanabhan, C. Blake, J. Brinkmann, Tamás Budavári, Andrew J. Connolly, István Csabai and 2 more. 2004

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Galaxy-galaxy lensing has emerged as a powerful probe of the dark matter haloes of galaxies, but is subject to contamination if intrinsically aligned satellites of the lens galaxy are used as part of the source sample. We present a measurement of this intrinsic shear using 200 747 lens galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic sample and a sample of satellites selected using photometric redshifts. The mean intrinsic shear at transverse separations of 30-446 h -1 kpc is constrained to be -0.0062 < Δγ < +0.0066 (99.9 per cent confidence, including identified systematics), which limits contamination of the galaxy-galaxy lensing signal to at most ∼15 per cent on these scales. We present these limits as a function of transverse separation and lens luminosity. We furthermore investigate shear calibration biases in the SDSS, which can also affect galaxy-galaxy lensing, and conclude that the shear amplitude is calibrated to better than 18 per cent. This includes noise-induced calibration biases in the ellipticity, which are small for the sample considered here, but which can be more important if low signal-to-noise ratio or poorly resolved source galaxies are used.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f11d4daff259c4bfc0b114a68b54a32cea93f1a2

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Citations in the corpus

The Shear Testing Programme – I. Weak lensing analysis of simulated ground-based observations (2005, background): “…only be directly detected through the cosmic shear analysis of image simulations, although see the discussion on self-calibration in Huterer et al. (2006) and Hirata et al. (2004) and Mandelbaum et al. (2005) for model-dependent estimates of shear calibration errors in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.”
Density profiles of galaxy groups and clusters from SDSS galaxy–galaxy weak lensing (2006, methodology): “…the fainter sources around a large, bright galaxy may be pointing preferentially radially or tangentially towards it; unfortunately, constraints on this scenario are weak and/or difficult to convert to measurements of lensing shear (Lee & Pen 2001; Bernstein & Norberg 2002; Hirata et al. 2004).”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: weak lensing shape catalogues (2017, background): “Stage II surveys included DLS (Jee et al. 2013), SDSS (Lin et al. 2012; Huff et al. 2014), RCSLenS (Hildebrandt et al. 2016), CFHTLenS (Heymans et al. 2012) as well as early science verification (SV) DES results in Jarvis et al. (2016).”
The DES Science Verification weak lensing shear catalogues (2015, background): “This “noise bias” effect was first discussed in Bernstein & Jarvis (2002) and Hirata et al. (2004), and was found to be the most significant of the effects studied in the GREAT08 Challenge (Bridle et al. 2009, 2010).”
Constraints on intrinsic alignment contamination of weak lensing surveys using the MegaZ-LRG sample (2010, methodology): “Since we have noisy jackknife covariances obtained from a finite number of realisations, the inverse of these covariances, required for theχ2, is biased (Hirata et al. 2004; Hartlap et al. 2007).”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, methodology): “The first search was carried out in cross-correlation by Hirata et al. (2004) using luminous red galaxies in SDSS as the lenses and WMAP temperature anisotropies as the sources.”
Spin alignments within the cosmic web: a theory of constrained tidal torques near filaments (2015, background): “…Codis et al. 2015; Tenneti et al. 2015) and observational (e.g. Brown et al. 2002; Lee & Pen 2002; Bernstein & Norberg 2002; Heymans et al. 2004; Hirata et al. 2004; Hirata & Seljak 2004; Mandelbaum et al. 2006; Hirata et al. 2007; Mandelbaum et al. 2011; Joachimi et al. 2011, 2013a) efforts…”
Detection of large-scale intrinsic ellipticity—density correlation from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and implications for weak lensing surveys (2005, methodology): “These include Bernstein & Norberg (2002) and Hirata et al. (2004), who were interested in intrinsic alignment contamination of galaxy-galaxy lensing; Pen et al. (2000), Lee & Pen (2001), and Lee & Pen (2002), who were interested in using the tidal influence on intrinsic alignments to reconstruct…”
Intrinsic alignments of SDSS-III BOSS LOWZ sample galaxies (2014, methodology): “7 All p-values in this paper calculated from either χ2 or ∆χ2 use the simulation method described in Hirata et al. (2004) to account for the fact that the jackknife covariances are noisy, which modifies the expected χ2 distribution.”
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).”
Galaxy halo masses and satellite fractions from galaxy–galaxy lensing in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: stellar mass, luminosity, morphology and environment dependencies (2005, background): “However, we note that the values of χ2 are not expected to follow the usual χ2 distribution because of the noisiness of bootstrap covariance matrices (see Hirata et al. 2004 for a fuller description of these results).”
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).”
Dark energy constraints from cosmic shear power spectra: impact of intrinsic alignments on photometric redshift requirements (2007, methodology): “This is not surprising since the amplitude of the linear alignment model was taken from Hirata et al. (2004) who made a fit to the Heymans et al. (2004b) data which is not far from the Mandelbaum et al. (2006) result.”
The Intrinsic Alignment of Galaxies and its Impact on Weak Gravitational Lensing in an Era of Precision Cosmology (2014, background): “…has put stringent constraints on the intrinsic alignment signal in galaxy-galaxy lensing to be −0.0062 < ∆γ < +0.0066 (99.9 per cent confidence) at transverse separations of 30446 h−1 kpc, where ∆γ is the mean intrinsic shear due to intrinsic alignment (see appendix A in Hirata et al. (2004)).”
Cosmological parameter constraints from galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy clustering with the SDSS DR7 (2012, methodology): “Rather than modifying the procedure for using them to get confidence intervals, as in Hirata et al. (2004) or Hartlap et al. (2007), we instead model the matrices to make noiseless versions.”
The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: Direct constraints on blue galaxy intrinsic alignments at intermediate redshifts (2009, methodology): “To include the effects of noise, we use a simulation based on the formalism in Appendix D of Hirata et al. (2004).”
Gravitational lensing (2010, background): “The authors of [192] estimated this possible contamination and constrained it to less than 15% at the relevant scales.”