Related papers: Cosmic shear without shape noise
With a primary goal of conducting precision weak lensing measurements from space, the COSMOS survey has imaged the largest contiguous area observed by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to date using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).…
We show, using the pseudo-$C_\ell$ technique, how to estimate cosmic shear and galaxy-galaxy lensing power spectra that are insensitive to the effects of multiple sources of lensing bias including source-lens clustering, magnification bias…
To render cosmic shear an astronomical tool of high precision, it is essential to eliminate systematic effects upon its signal, one of the most significant ones being correlations between the gravitational shear and the intrinsic…
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…
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…
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,…
In tomographic weak lensing surveys, the presence of nulling properties reveals symmetries inherent in the data, which rely solely on the geometrical properties of the Universe. Ensuring its validity thus provides us with constraints on the…
Cosmic shear is a primary cosmological probe for several present and upcoming surveys investigating dark matter and dark energy, such as Euclid or WFIRST. The probe requires an extremely accurate measurement of the shapes of millions of…
In this paper we introduce a new observable to measure cosmic shear. We show that if we can measure with good accuracy both, the orientation of a galaxy and the polarisation direction of its radio emission, the angle between them is…
We present a three dimensional cosmic shear analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS survey, the largest ever optical imaging program performed in space. We have measured the shapes of galaxies for the tell-tale distortions caused by…
We present and describe im3shape, a new publicly available galaxy shape measurement code for weak gravitational lensing shear. im3shape performs a maximum likelihood fit of a bulge-plus-disc galaxy model to noisy images, incorporating an…
We describe and test the pipeline used to measure the weak lensing shear signal from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS). It includes a novel method of `self-calibration' that partially corrects for the effect of noise bias. We also discuss the…
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…
Cosmic shear is the distortion of images of distant galaxies due to weak gravitational lensing by the large-scale structure in the Universe. Such images are coherently deformed by the tidal field of matter inhomogeneities along the line of…
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…
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 present measurements of weak gravitational lensing cosmic shear two-point statistics using Dark Energy Survey Science Verification data. We demonstrate that our results are robust to the choice of shear measurement pipeline, either ngmix…
Current optical imaging surveys for cosmology are covering large areas of sky. To exploit the statistical power of these surveys for weak lensing measurements requires shape measurement methods with subpercent systematic errors. We…
Weak lensing shear estimation typically results in per galaxy statistical errors significantly larger than the sought after gravitational signal of only a few percent. These statistical errors are mostly a result of shape-noise -- an…
We have developed a new technique called Direct Shear Mapping (DSM) to measure gravitational lensing shear directly from observations of a single background source. The technique assumes the velocity map of an un-lensed, stably-rotating…