Related papers: Cosmic Shear Systematics: Software-Hardware Balanc…
Cosmic shear requires high precision measurement of galaxy shapes in the presence of the observational Point Spread Function (PSF) that smears out the image. The PSF must therefore be known for each galaxy to a high accuracy. However, for…
The control of systematic effects when measuring galaxy shapes is one of the main challenges for cosmic shear analyses. In this context, we study the fundamental limitations on shear accuracy due to the measurement of the Point Spread…
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…
We propose to measure the weak cosmic shear using the spatial derivatives of the galaxy surface brightness field. The measurement should be carried out in Fourier space, in which the point spread function (PSF) can be transformed to a…
Current measurements of the weak lensing signal induced by large scale structure provide useful constraints on a range of cosmological parameters. However, the ultimate succes of this technique depends on the accuracy with which one can…
We study the possibility of using quadrupole moments of auto-convolved galaxy images to measure cosmic shear. The autoconvolution of an image corresponds to the inverse Fourier transformation of its power spectrum. The new method has the…
Current and future imaging surveys will measure cosmic shear with a statistical precision that demands a deeper understanding of potential systematic biases in galaxy shape measurements than has been achieved to date. We investigate the…
A long standing problem in weak lensing is about how to construct cosmic shear estimators from galaxy images. Conventional methods average over a single quantity per galaxy to estimate each shear component. We show that any such shear…
Modeling the Point Spread Function (PSF) of wide-field surveys is vital for many astrophysical applications and cosmological probes including weak gravitational lensing. The PSF smears the image of any recorded object and therefore needs to…
For cosmic shear to become an accurate cosmological probe, systematic errors in the shear measurement method must be unambiguously identified and corrected for. Previous work of this series has demonstrated that cosmic shears can be…
Galaxy imaging surveys observe a vast number of objects that are affected by the instrument's Point Spread Function (PSF). Weak lensing missions, in particular, aim at measuring the shape of galaxies, and PSF effects represent an important…
Cosmic shear has been identified as the method with the most potential to constrain dark energy. To capitalise on this potential it is necessary to measure galaxy shapes with great accuracy, which in turn requires a detailed model for the…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure allows a direct measure of the dark matter distribution. We have used parallel images taken with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on the Hubble Space Telescope to measure weak lensing, or…
We present the theoretical and analytical bases of optimal techniques to measure weak gravitational shear from images of galaxies. We first characterize the geometric space of shears and ellipticity, then use this geometric interpretation…
Chromatic point-spread-function (PSF) effects arise from differences between the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of stars, used to model the PSF, and galaxies, used to measure shape distortions due to weak gravitational lensing, or…
Cosmic shear is one of the most powerful probes of Dark Energy, targeted by several current and future galaxy surveys. Lensing shear, however, is only sampled at the positions of galaxies with measured shapes in the catalog, making its…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure provides a direct measurement of matter fluctuations in the universe. We report a measurement of this `cosmic shear' based on 271 WFPC2 archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope Medium Deep Survey…
The spatial variation of the colour of a galaxy may introduce a bias in the measurement of its shape if the PSF profile depends on wavelength. We study how this bias depends on the properties of the PSF and the galaxies themselves. The bias…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure provides a unique method to directly measure matter fluctuations in the universe, and has recently been detected from the ground. Here, we report the first detection of this `cosmic shear' based on…
We have developed a new technique for weak lensing analysis, with which the effect of the point spread function (PSF) on small galaxy images can be corrected for accurately. Rather than relying on weighted second moments of detected images,…