scholarly journals Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: the effect of intracluster light on photometric redshifts for weak gravitational lensing

2019 ◽  
Vol 488 (3) ◽  
pp. 4389-4399 ◽  
Author(s):  
D Gruen ◽  
Y Zhang ◽  
A Palmese ◽  
B Yanny ◽  
V Busti ◽  
...  

Abstract We study the effect of diffuse intracluster light on the critical surface mass density estimated from photometric redshifts of lensing source galaxies, and the resulting bias in a weak lensing measurement of galaxy cluster mass. Under conservative assumptions, we find the bias to be negligible for imaging surveys like the Dark Energy Survey with a recommended scale cut of ≥200 kpc distance from cluster centres. For significantly deeper lensing source galaxy catalogues from present and future surveys like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope program, more conservative scale and source magnitude cuts or a correction of the effect may be necessary to achieve percent level lensing measurement accuracy, especially at the massive end of the cluster population.

2019 ◽  
Vol 490 (3) ◽  
pp. 3573-3587 ◽  
Author(s):  
Y Fang ◽  
N Hamaus ◽  
B Jain ◽  
S Pandey ◽  
G Pollina ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT What are the mass and galaxy profiles of cosmic voids? In this paper, we use two methods to extract voids in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 1 redMaGiC galaxy sample to address this question. We use either 2D slices in projection, or the 3D distribution of galaxies based on photometric redshifts to identify voids. For the mass profile, we measure the tangential shear profiles of background galaxies to infer the excess surface mass density. The signal-to-noise ratio for our lensing measurement ranges between 10.7 and 14.0 for the two void samples. We infer their 3D density profiles by fitting models based on N-body simulations and find good agreement for void radii in the range 15–85 Mpc. Comparison with their galaxy profiles then allows us to test the relation between mass and light at the 10 per cent level, the most stringent test to date. We find very similar shapes for the two profiles, consistent with a linear relationship between mass and light both within and outside the void radius. We validate our analysis with the help of simulated mock catalogues and estimate the impact of photometric redshift uncertainties on the measurement. Our methodology can be used for cosmological applications, including tests of gravity with voids. This is especially promising when the lensing profiles are combined with spectroscopic measurements of void dynamics via redshift-space distortions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 638 ◽  
pp. L1 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Joudaki ◽  
H. Hildebrandt ◽  
D. Traykova ◽  
N. E. Chisari ◽  
C. Heymans ◽  
...  

We present a combined tomographic weak gravitational lensing analysis of the Kilo Degree Survey (KV450) and the Dark Energy Survey (DES-Y1). We homogenize the analysis of these two public cosmic shear datasets by adopting consistent priors and modeling of nonlinear scales, and determine new redshift distributions for DES-Y1 based on deep public spectroscopic surveys. Adopting these revised redshifts results in a 0.8σ reduction in the DES-inferred value for S​8, which decreases to a 0.5σ reduction when including a systematic redshift calibration error model from mock DES data based on the MICE2 simulation. The combined KV450+DES-Y1 constraint on S8 = 0.762−0.024+0.025 is in tension with the Planck 2018 constraint from the cosmic microwave background at the level of 2.5σ. This result highlights the importance of developing methods to provide accurate redshift calibration for current and future weak-lensing surveys.


2020 ◽  
Vol 500 (1) ◽  
pp. 859-870
Author(s):  
Ben Moews ◽  
Morgan A Schmitz ◽  
Andrew J Lawler ◽  
Joe Zuntz ◽  
Alex I Malz ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Cosmic voids and their corresponding redshift-projected mass densities, known as troughs, play an important role in our attempt to model the large-scale structure of the Universe. Understanding these structures enables us to compare the standard model with alternative cosmologies, constrain the dark energy equation of state, and distinguish between different gravitational theories. In this paper, we extend the subspace-constrained mean shift algorithm, a recently introduced method to estimate density ridges, and apply it to 2D weak lensing mass density maps from the Dark Energy Survey Y1 data release to identify curvilinear filamentary structures. We compare the obtained ridges with previous approaches to extract trough structure in the same data, and apply curvelets as an alternative wavelet-based method to constrain densities. We then invoke the Wasserstein distance between noisy and noiseless simulations to validate the denoising capabilities of our method. Our results demonstrate the viability of ridge estimation as a precursor for denoising weak lensing observables to recover the large-scale structure, paving the way for a more versatile and effective search for troughs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 497 (3) ◽  
pp. 2529-2539 ◽  
Author(s):  
K Eckert ◽  
G M Bernstein ◽  
A Amara ◽  
A Amon ◽  
A Choi ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT For ground-based optical imaging with current CCD technology, the Poisson fluctuations in source and sky background photon arrivals dominate the noise budget and are readily estimated. Another component of noise, however, is the signal from the undetected population of stars and galaxies. Using injection of artifical galaxies into images, we demonstrate that the measured variance of galaxy moments (used for weak gravitational lensing measurements) in Dark Energy Survey (DES) images is significantly in excess of the Poisson predictions, by up to 30 per cent, and that the background sky levels are overestimated by current software. By cross-correlating distinct images of ‘empty’ sky regions, we establish that there is a significant image noise contribution from undetected static sources (US), which, on average, are mildly resolved at DES resolution. Treating these US as a stationary noise source, we compute a correction to the moment covariance matrix expected from Poisson noise. The corrected covariance matrix matches the moment variances measured on the injected DES images to within 5 per cent. Thus, we have an empirical method to statistically account for US in weak lensing measurements, rather than requiring extremely deep sky simulations. We also find that local sky determinations can remove most of the bias in flux measurements, at a small penalty in additional, but quantifiable, noise.


2020 ◽  
Vol 496 (3) ◽  
pp. 4051-4059
Author(s):  
E Macaulay ◽  
D Bacon ◽  
R C Nichol ◽  
T M Davis ◽  
J Elvin-Poole ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT We consider the effects of weak gravitational lensing on observations of 196 spectroscopically confirmed Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) from years 1 to 3 of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We simultaneously measure both the angular correlation function and the non-Gaussian skewness caused by weak lensing. This approach has the advantage of being insensitive to the intrinsic dispersion of SNe Ia magnitudes. We model the amplitude of both effects as a function of σ8, and find σ8 =1.2$^{+0.9}_{-0.8}$. We also apply our method to a subsample of 488 SNe from the Joint Light-curve Analysis (JLA; chosen to match the redshift range we use for this work), and find σ8 =0.8$^{+1.1}_{-0.7}$. The comparable uncertainty in σ8 between DES–SN and the larger number of SNe from JLA highlights the benefits of homogeneity of the DES–SN sample, and improvements in the calibration and data analysis.


2019 ◽  
Vol 874 (2) ◽  
pp. 165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Y. Zhang ◽  
B. Yanny ◽  
A. Palmese ◽  
D. Gruen ◽  
C. To ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 503 (2) ◽  
pp. 2688-2705
Author(s):  
C Doux ◽  
E Baxter ◽  
P Lemos ◽  
C Chang ◽  
A Alarcon ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Beyond ΛCDM, physics or systematic errors may cause subsets of a cosmological data set to appear inconsistent when analysed assuming ΛCDM. We present an application of internal consistency tests to measurements from the Dark Energy Survey Year 1 (DES Y1) joint probes analysis. Our analysis relies on computing the posterior predictive distribution (PPD) for these data under the assumption of ΛCDM. We find that the DES Y1 data have an acceptable goodness of fit to ΛCDM, with a probability of finding a worse fit by random chance of p = 0.046. Using numerical PPD tests, supplemented by graphical checks, we show that most of the data vector appears completely consistent with expectations, although we observe a small tension between large- and small-scale measurements. A small part (roughly 1.5 per cent) of the data vector shows an unusually large departure from expectations; excluding this part of the data has negligible impact on cosmological constraints, but does significantly improve the p-value to 0.10. The methodology developed here will be applied to test the consistency of DES Year 3 joint probes data sets.


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