Related papers: Direct Shear Mapping - a new weak lensing tool
The current methods available to estimate gravitational shear from astronomical images of galaxies introduce systematic errors which can affect the accuracy of weak lensing cosmological constraints. We study the impact of KSB shape…
Image distortion due to weak gravitational lensing is examined using a non-perturbative method of integrating the geodesic deviation and optical scalar equations along the null geodesics connecting the observer to a distant source. The…
So far, estimators of galaxy shape distortions are only carefully studied perturbatively in the case of small shear signals, mainly for weak lensing science. However, in the neighborhood of massive foreground clusters, a large number of…
We apply a mass reconstruction technique to simulated large-scale structure gravitational distortion maps, from 2.5' to 10 degree scales, for different cosmological scenarii. The projected mass is reconstructed using a non-parametric least…
With the availability of galaxy distance indicators in weak lensing surveys, lensing tomography can be harnessed to constrain the three-dimensional (3D) matter power spectrum over a range of redshift and physical scale. By combining…
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…
Context. Weak gravitational lensing is a powerful probe of large-scale structure and cosmology. Most commonly, second-order correlations of observed galaxy ellipticities are expressed as a projection of the matter power spectrum,…
We present a direct detection of the growth of large-scale structure, using weak gravitational lensing and photometric redshift data from the COMBO-17 survey. We use deep R-band imaging of two 0.25 square degree fields, affording shear…
The principles of measuring the shapes of galaxies by a model-fitting approach are discussed in the context of shape-measurement for surveys of weak gravitational lensing. It is argued that such an approach should be optimal, allowing…
We have developed a new three-dimensional algorithm, based on the standard P$^3$M method, for computing deflections due to weak gravitational lensing. We compare the results of this method with those of the two-dimensional planar approach,…
Weak gravitational lensing allows one to reconstruct the spatial distribution of the projected mass density across the sky. These "mass maps" provide a powerful tool for studying cosmology as they probe both luminous and dark matter. In…
We develop a new method to estimate gravitational shear by adopting an elliptical weight function to measure background galaxy images. In doing so, we introduce a new concept of "zero plane" which is an imaginal source plane where shapes of…
Line-of-sight effects in strong gravitational lensing have long been treated as a nuisance. However, it was recently proposed that the line-of-sight shear could be a cosmological observable in its own right, if it is not degenerate with…
The unprecedented amount and the excellent quality of lensing data that the upcoming ground- and space-based surveys will produce represent a great opportunity to shed light on the questions that still remain unanswered concerning our…
With increasingly large data sets, weak lensing measurements are able to measure cosmological parameters with ever greater precision. However this increased accuracy also places greater demands on the statistical tools used to extract the…
Weak gravitational lensing surveys are rapidly becoming important tools to probe directly the mass density fluctuations in the universe and its background dynamics. Earlier studies have shown that it is possible to model the statistics of…
It is now routine to measure the weak gravitational lensing shear signal from the mean ellipticity of distant galaxies. However, conversion between ellipticity and shear assumes local linearity of the lensing potential (ie that the spatial…
Gravitational lensing induces significant errors in the measured distances to high-redshift standard candles and standard sirens such as type-Ia supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and merging supermassive black hole binaries. There will…
Metacalibration is a state-of-the-art technique for measuring weak gravitational lensing shear from well-sampled galaxy images. We investigate the accuracy of shear measured with metacalibration from fitting elliptical Gaussians to…
We present the results of the GREAT08 Challenge, a blind analysis challenge to infer weak gravitational lensing shear distortions from images. The primary goal was to stimulate new ideas by presenting the problem to researchers outside the…