Related papers: Cosmic shear surveys
Weak lensing by large-scale structure provides a direct measurement of matter fluctuations in the universe. We report a measurement of this `cosmic shear' based on 271 WFPC2 archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope Medium Deep Survey…
Cosmic shear surveys have great promise as tools for precision cosmology, but can be subject to systematic errors including intrinsic ellipticity correlations of the source galaxies. The intrinsic alignments are believed to be small for…
Gravitational lensing causes a correlation between a population of foreground large-scale structures and the observed number density of the background distant galaxies as a consequence of the flux magnification and the lensing area…
Weak lensing is the distortion (polarization) of images of distant objects, such as high redshift galaxies, by gravitational fields in the limit where the distortion is small. Gravitational potential fluctuations due to large scale…
Weak lensing by large scale structure or 'cosmic shear' is a potentially powerful cosmological probe to shed new light on Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Modified Gravity. It is based on the weak distortions induced by large-scale structures…
Weak gravitational lensing is a unique probe of the dark side of the universe: it provides a direct way to map the distribution of dark matter around galaxies, clusters of galaxies and on cosmological scales. Furthermore, the measurement of…
Measurements of ellipticities of background galaxies are sensitive to the reduced shear, the cosmic shear divided by $(1-\kappa)$ where $\kappa$ is the projected density field. We compute the difference between shear and reduced shear both…
Weak gravitational lensing by foreground density perturbations generates a gradient mode in the shear of background images. In contrast, cosmological tensor perturbations induce a non-zero curl mode associated with image rotations. In this…
Cosmic voids refer to the large empty regions in the universe with a very low number density of galaxies. Voids are likely to be severely disturbed by the tidal effect from the surrounding dark matter. We derive a completely analytic model…
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…
Gravitational lensing can provide pure geometric tests of the structure of space-time, for instance by determining empirically the angular diameter distance-redshift relation. This geometric test has been demonstrated several times using…
We measure seeing-corrected ellipticities for 2 x 10^6 galaxies with magnitude R<23 in 12 widely separated fields totalling 75 deg^2 of sky. At angular scales >30\arcmin, ellipticity correlations are detected at high significance and…
The subject of this paper is to build a physical model describing shape and size correlations of galaxies due to weak gravitational lensing and due to direct tidal interaction of elliptical galaxies with gravitational fields sourced by the…
The correlation between cosmic shear as measured by the image distortion of high-redshift galaxies and the number counts of foreground galaxies is calculated. For a given power spectrum of the cosmic density fluctuations, this correlation…
Weak gravitational lensing causes subtle changes in the apparent shapes of galaxies due to the bending of light by the gravity of foreground masses. By measuring the shapes of large numbers of galaxies (millions in recent surveys, up to…
During the past few years, secure detections of cosmic shear have been obtained, manifest in the correlation of the observed ellipticities of galaxies. Constraints have already been placed on cosmological parameters, such as the…
We derive expressions, in terms of "polar shapelets", for the image distortion operations associated with weak gravitational lensing. Shear causes galaxy shapes to become elongated, and is sensitive to the second derivative of the projected…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure provides a unique method to directly measure matter fluctuations in the universe, and has recently been detected from the ground. Here, we report the first detection of this `cosmic shear' based on…
The wealth of incoming and future cosmological observations will allow us to map out the structure and evolution of the observable universe to an unprecedented level of precision. Among these observations is the weak gravitational lensing…
We use statistical inference theory to explore the constraints from future galaxy weak lensing (cosmic shear) surveys combined with the current CMB constraints on cosmological parameters, focusing particularly on the running of the spectral…