Related papers: Lensing Bias in Cosmic Shear
Galaxy shapes are not randomly oriented, rather they are statistically aligned in a way that can depend on formation environment, history and galaxy type. Studying the alignment of galaxies can therefore deliver important information about…
We report a detection of the coherent distortion of faint galaxies arising from gravitational lensing by foreground structures. This ``cosmic shear'' is potentially the most direct measure of the mass power spectrum, as it is unaffected by…
Cosmic shear leads to a correlation of the observed ellipticities of galaxies, an effect which is used to place constraints on cosmological parameters, and to explore the evolution of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. However, a…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure is an invaluable cosmological tool given that most of the energy density of the concordance cosmology is invisible. Several large ground-based imaging surveys will attempt to measure this effect over…
This paper presents the results of a systematic study of projection biases in the Weak Lensing analysis of cosmic shear and the combination of galaxy clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing using data collected during the first-year of running…
Upcoming weak lensing surveys will survey large cosmological volumes to measure the growth of cosmological structure with time and thereby constrain dark energy. One major systematic uncertainty in this process is the calibration of the…
Gravitational lensing directly measures mass density fluctuations along the lines of sight to very distant objects. No assumptions need to be made concerning bias, the ratio of fluctuations in galaxy density to mass density. Hence, lensing…
We re-analyze constraints on the cosmological constant that can be obtained by examining the statistics of strong gravitational lensing of distant quasars by intervening galaxies, focusing on uncertainties in galaxy models (including…
Gravitationally-lensed quasars can be discovered as a by-product of galaxy redshift surveys. Lenses discovered spectroscopically in this way should require less observational effort per event than those found in dedicated lens surveys.…
A large fraction of known galaxy-lens systems require a component of external shear to explain the observed image geometries. In most cases, this shear can be attributed to a nearby group of galaxies. We discuss how the dark-matter mass…
The cosmological interpretation of weak lensing by large-scale structures requires knowledge of the redshift distribution of the source galaxies. Current lensing surveys are often calibrated using external redshift samples which span a…
The phenomenon of cosmic shear, or distortion of images of distant sources unaccompanied by magnification, is an effective way of probing the content and state of the foreground Universe, because light rays do not have to pass through mass…
Strong gravitational lensing at the galaxy scale is a valuable tool for various applications in astrophysics and cosmology. The primary uses of galaxy-scale lensing are to study elliptical galaxies' mass structure and evolution, constrain…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure is a powerful probe of cosmology if the apparent alignments in the shapes of distant galaxies can be accurately measured. Most studies have therefore focused on improving the fidelity of the shape…
We present new results on the gravitational lensing shear and magnification power spectra obtained from numerical simulations of a flat cosmology with a cosmological constant. These results are of considerable interest since both the shear…
We identify and study a previously unknown systematic effect on cosmic shear measurements, caused by the selection of galaxies used for shape measurement, in particular the rejection of close (blended) galaxy pairs. We use ray-tracing…
Most of the matter in the universe is not luminous and can be observed directly only through its gravitational effect. An emerging technique called weak gravitational lensing uses background galaxies to reveal the foreground dark matter…
For a wide variety of cosmological models characterized by the cosmic mass density $\Omega_M$ and the normalized cosmological constant $\Omega_{\Lambda}$, we derive an analytic expression for the estimate of magnification cross-sections by…
Next-generation cosmological surveys will observe larger cosmic volumes than ever before, enabling us to access information on the primordial Universe, as well as on relativistic effects. In a companion paper, we applied a Fisher analysis…
Magnification changes the observed number counts of galaxies on the sky. This biases the observed tangential shear profiles around galaxies, the so-called galaxy-galaxy lensing (GGL) signal, and the related excess mass profile.…