English

Lensing in the Blue III: Weak Lensing Shape Catalogs of 30 Merging Galaxy Clusters

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-03-20 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

We present the weak gravitational lensing dataset from the Super-pressure Balloon-Borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT), which imaged 30 galaxy clusters during its 45 night flight in April to May 2023. SuperBIT is a first-of-its-kind balloon-borne imaging telescope that achieved near diffraction-limited observations in near-space conditions above 98% of the Earth's atmosphere. We use the metacalibration algorithm to obtain calibrated galaxy shapes for our target clusters and several calibration fields, enabling unbiased reconstruction of the weak-lensing signal. We employ several diagnostics throughout the pipeline, including assessments of point-spread function (PSF) modeling residuals and their impact on weak-lensing measurements, as well as tests for correlations between galaxy shapes and measured galaxy and PSF properties. To assess the multiplicative shear bias of the pipeline, we analyze a parallel set of simulated images that incorporate the real observing conditions from the flight, including measured SuperBIT PSFs, observed sky backgrounds, and detector noise, yielding a bias of (1.1±7.8)(1.1 \pm 7.8)~per~cent.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.18376,
  title  = {Lensing in the Blue III: Weak Lensing Shape Catalogs of 30 Merging Galaxy Clusters},
  author = {Sayan Saha and Jacqueline E. McCleary and Spencer W. Everett and Maya Amit and Georgios N. Vassilakis and Emaad Paracha and Leo W. H. Fung and Steven J. Benton and William C. Jones and Gavin Leroy and Eric M. Huff and Richard Massey and Thuy Vy T. Luu and Ajay S. Gill and Mohamed M. Shaaban and Philippe Voyer and Anthony M. Brown and Giulia Cerini and Paul Clark and Matthew Craigie and Christopher J. Damaren and Tim Eifler and David Harvey and Eric Habjan and John W. Hartley and Bradley Holder and Mathilde Jauzac and David Lagattuta and Jason S. -Y. Leung and Lun Li and Johanna M. Nagy and C. Barth Netterfield and Susan F. Redmond and Jason D. Rhodes and Andrew Robertson and L. Javier Romualdez and Jurgen Schmoll and Ellen Sirks and Sut Ieng Tam and André Z. Vitorelli and Alfredo Zenteno},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.18376},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

29 pages, 22 figures, 2 table