Coherent alignments of galaxy shapes, often called "intrinsic alignments" (IA), are the most significant source of astrophysical uncertainty in weak lensing measurements. We develop the tidal alignment model of IA and demonstrate its success in describing observational data. We also describe a technique to separate IA from galaxy-galaxy lensing measurements. Applying this technique to luminous red galaxy lenses in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we constrain potential IA contamination from associated sources to be below a few percent.
@article{arxiv.1504.04412,
title = {Large-scale structure and the intrinsic alignment of galaxies},
author = {Jonathan Blazek and Uroš Seljak and Rachel Mandelbaum},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.04412},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
4 pages, 2 figures. Proceedings of IAU Symposium 308 "The Zeldovich Universe: Genesis and Growth of the Cosmic Web", 23-28 June 2014, Tallinn, Estonia