Related papers: The Limits of Cosmic Shear
With the advent of large-scale weak lensing surveys there is a need to understand how realistic, scale-dependent systematics bias cosmic shear and dark energy measurements, and how they can be removed. Here we describe how spatial…
Since the Universe is inhomogeneous on scales well below the Hubble radius, light bundles from distant galaxies are deflected and distorted by the tidal gravitational field of the large-scale matter distribution as they propagate through…
We use weak lensing data from the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS survey to measure the second- and third-moments of the cosmic shear field, estimated from about 450,000 galaxies with average redshift <z> ~ 1.3. We measure two- and…
We present a comprehensive full-sky 3-dimensional analysis of the weak-lensing fields and their corresponding power spectra. Using the formalism of spin-weight spherical harmonics and spherical Bessel functions, we relate the two-point…
Only galaxies bright enough and large enough to be unambiguously identified and measured are included in galaxy surveys used to estimate cosmic shear. We demonstrate that because gravitational lensing can scatter galaxies across the…
We introduce the Generalised Lensing and Shear Spectra GLaSS code which is available for download from https://github.com/astro-informatics/GLaSS It is a fast and flexible public code, written in Python, that computes generalized spherical…
Lensing peaks have been proposed as a useful statistic, containing cosmological information from non-Gaussianities that is inaccessible from traditional two-point statistics such as the power spectrum or two-point correlation functions.…
We perform a cosmic shear analysis of the COMBO-17 survey -- a unique dataset with shear quality R-band imaging and accurate photometric redshift estimates (dz=0.05) for ~90% of galaxies to R=24.0. We undertake a full maximum likelihood…
The weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies by large-scale structure is expected to become a powerful probe of dark energy. By measuring the ellipticities of large numbers of background galaxies, the subtle gravitational distortion…
Cosmic shear is a powerful probe of cosmological distances, matter abundance and clustering in the low-redshift Universe. Cosmological parameter extraction from cosmic shear data is limited by our understanding of baryonic astrophysics,…
We present the first "clipped" cosmic shear measurement using data from the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS-450). "Clipping" transformations suppress the signal from the highest density, non-linear regions of cosmological fields. We demonstrate…
Owing to the mass-sheet degeneracy, cosmic shear maps do not probe directly the Fourier modes of the underlying mass distribution on scales comparable to the survey size and larger. To assess the corresponding effect on attainable…
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…
(abridged) We study the accuracy of various approximations to cosmic shear and weak galaxy-galaxy lensing and investigate effects of Born corrections and lens-lens coupling. We use ray-tracing through the Millennium Simulation to calculate…
The abundance of peaks in weak gravitational lensing maps is a potentially powerful cosmological tool, complementary to measurements of the shear power spectrum. We study peaks detected directly in shear maps, rather than convergence maps,…
We investigate the impact of a common approximation on weak lensing power spectra: the use of single-epoch matter power spectra in integrals over redshift. We disentangle this from the closely connected Limber's approximation. We derive the…
Advances in upcoming weak lensing surveys pose new challenges for an accurate modeling of the lensing observables. The wide sky coverage of Euclid makes angular scales down to $l_\mathrm{min}=10$ accessible. At such large angular scales,…
We present an angular power spectrum analysis of the 2MASS full release extended source catalogue. The main sample used includes 518,576 galaxies below an extinction-corrected magnitude of K=13.5 and limited to |b|>20. The power spectrum…
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…
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…