Related papers: On the Probability Distributions of Ellipticity
Weak gravitational lensing analyses are fundamentally limited by the intrinsic, non-Gaussian distribution of galaxy shapes. We explore alternative statistics for samples of ellipticity measurements that are unbiased, efficient, and robust.…
Weak-lensing shear estimates show a troublesome dependence on the apparent brightness of the galaxies used to measure the ellipticity: In several studies, the amplitude of the inferred shear falls sharply with decreasing source…
The intrinsic scatter in the ellipticities of galaxies about the mean shape, known as "shape noise," is the most important source of noise in weak lensing shear measurements. Several approaches to reducing shape noise have recently been put…
We develop a method for performing a weak lensing analysis using only measurements of galaxy position angles. By analysing the statistical properties of the galaxy orientations given a known intrinsic ellipticity distribution, we show that…
We show that galaxy ellipticity estimation for weak gravitational lensing with unweighted image moments reduces to the problem of measuring a combination of the means of three independent normal random variables. Under very general…
We investigate the problem of noise bias in maximum likelihood and maximum a posteriori estimators for cosmic shear. We derive the leading and next-to-leading order biases and compute them in the context of galaxy ellipticity measurements,…
We study the effects of ellipticity in lens galaxies and external tidal shear from neighboring objects on the statistics of strong gravitational lenses. For isothermal lens galaxies normalized so that the Einstein radius is independent of…
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…
An unbiased estimator for the ellipticity of an object in a noisy image is given in terms of the image moments. Three assumptions are made: i) the pixel noise is normally distributed, although with arbitrary covariance matrix, ii) the image…
Weak gravitational lensing has the potential to constrain cosmological parameters to high precision. However, as shown by the Shear TEsting Programmes (STEP) and GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing (GREAT) Challenges, measuring galaxy…
This paper extends the method introduced in Rivi et al. (2016b) to measure galaxy ellipticities in the visibility domain for radio weak lensing surveys. In that paper we focused on the development and testing of the method for the simple…
Future orbiting observatories will survey large areas of sky in order to constrain the physics of dark matter and dark energy using weak gravitational lensing and other methods. Lossy compression of the resultant data will improve the cost…
We study the ellipticity of galaxy cluster halos as characterized by the distribution of cluster galaxies and as measured with weak lensing. We use monte-carlo simulations of elliptical cluster density profiles to estimate and correct for…
The weak distortions produced by gravitational lensing in the images of background galaxies provide a method to measure directly the distribution of mass in the universe. However this technique requires high precision measurements of the…
One of the most powerful techniques to study the dark sector of the Universe is weak gravitational lensing. In practice, to infer the reduced shear, weak lensing measures galaxy shapes, which are the consequence of both the intrinsic…
We explore the possibility that an intrinsic correlation between galaxy ellipticities arising during the galaxy formation process may account for part of the shear signal recently reported by several groups engaged in weak lensing surveys.…
We extend the Bayesian model fitting shape measurement method presented in Miller et al. (2007) and use the method to estimate the shear from the Shear TEsting Programme simulations (STEP). The method uses a fast model fitting algorithm…
Weak lensing experiments are a powerful probe of cosmology through their measurement of the mass distribution of the universe. A challenge for this technique is to control systematic errors that occur when measuring the shapes of distant…
Precision weak gravitational lensing experiments require measurements of galaxy shapes accurate to <1 part in 1000. We investigate measurement biases, noted by Voigt and Bridle (2009) and Melchior et al. (2009), that are common to shape…
Using overlapping fields with space-based Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and ground-based Subaru Telescope imaging we identify a population of blended galaxies that are blended to such a large degree that they are detected as single objects…