Related papers: Intrinsic and extrinsic gravitational flexions
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.…
Canonically, elliptical galaxies might be expected to have a perfect rotational symmetry, making them ideal targets for flexion studies - however, this assumption hasn't been tested. We have undertaken an analysis of low and high redshift…
We present a general perturbative effective field theory (EFT) description of galaxy shape correlations, which are commonly known as intrinsic alignments. This rigorous approach extends current analytical modelling strategies in that it…
Galaxy shapes are not randomly oriented, rather they are statistically aligned in a way that can depend on formation environment, history and galaxy type. Studying the alignment of galaxies can therefore deliver important information about…
Weak gravitational lensing flexions are a kind of weak lensing distortion which are defined as the spin 1 and spin 3 combinations of the third order derivatives of gravitational lensing potential. Since the shear has spin 2 combination of…
Exotic objects such as the Ellis wormhole are expected to act as gravitational lenses. Much like their nonexotic counterparts, information about these lenses can be found by considering the strong and weak lensing fields they induce. In…
Gravitational lenses on galaxy scales are plausibly modelled as having ellipsoidal symmetry and a universal dark matter density profile, with a Sersic profile to describe the distribution of baryonic matter. Predicting all lensing effects…
Point estimators for the shearing of galaxy images induced by gravitational lensing involve a complex inverse problem in the presence of noise, pixelization, and model uncertainties. We present a probabilistic forward modeling approach to…
We investigate analytically a large-scale coherence in the orientation of galaxies embedded in two-dimensional sheet-like structures in the frame of the tidal torque theory. Assuming that the galaxy spin and the surrounding matter fields…
Topic of this paper is the time-evolution of intrinsic correlations of galaxy ellipticities due to peculiar motion. In our model, the galaxy ellipticities are determined from the angular momentum of their host haloes, which can be computed…
Cosmic shear is a powerful method to constrain cosmology, provided that any systematic effects are under control. The intrinsic alignment of galaxies is expected to severely bias parameter estimates if not taken into account. We explore the…
Measuring dark matter substructure within galaxy cluster haloes is a fundamental probe of the Lambda-CDM model of structure formation. Gravitational lensing is a technique for measuring the total mass distribution which is independent of…
Luminosity profiles of galaxies acting as strong gravitational lenses can be tricky to study. Indeed, strong gravitational lensing images display several lensed components, both point-like and diffuse, around the lensing galaxy. Those…
The correlations between the positions and shapes of galaxies, i.e. intrinsic alignments, have been measured in many observational studies and hydrodynamical simulations. The position-shape correlation measurements of disk galaxies with…
Correlations between intrinsic ellipticities of galaxies are a potentially important systematic error when constraining dark energy properties from weak gravitational lensing (cosmic shear) surveys. In the absence of perfectly known galaxy…
Tests for the intrinsic shape of the luminosity distribution in elliptical galaxies are discussed, with an emphasis on the uncertainties. Recent determinations of the ellipticity frequency function imply a paucity of nearly spherical…
In this paper, we develop a new gravitational lensing inversion technique. While traditional approaches assume that the lensing field varies little across a galaxy image, we note that this variation in the field can give rise to a…
The intrinsic alignment (IA) of galaxies acts as a systematic effect in weak lensing measurements and tends to introduce biases. It mimics the gravitational lensing signal which makes it difficult to distinguish it from the true…
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.…
The galaxy intrinsic alignment is a severe challenge to precision cosmic shear measurement. We propose to self-calibrate the induced gravitational shear-galaxy intrinsic ellipticity correlation (the GI correlation, \citealt{Hirata04b}) in…