Related papers: The cosmic shear STIS parallel program - First res…
The cosmic curvature, a fundamental parameter for cosmology could hold deep clues to inflation and cosmic origins. We propose an improved model-independent method to constrain the cosmic curvature by combining the constructed Hubble diagram…
We report on the detection of cosmic shear on angular scales of 1.3-6.5 arcmin using 45 independent empty fields observed with the Very Large Telescope (VLT). This result confirms previous measurements obtained with the CFH Telescope at the…
We report a measurement of cosmic shear correlations using an effective area of 6.5 sq. deg. of the VIRMOS deep imaging survey in progress at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. We measured various shear correlation functions, the aperture…
We show that the lensing efficiency of cosmic shear generically has a simple shape, even in the case of a tomographic survey with badly behaved photometric redshifts. We argue that source distributions for cosmic shear can therefore be more…
The weak distortions produced by gravitational lensing in the images of background galaxies provide a method to measure directly the distribution of mass in the universe. However this technique requires high precision measurements of the…
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 statistics of peak counts in reconstructed shear maps contain information beyond the power spectrum, and can improve cosmological constraints from measurements of the power spectrum alone if systematic errors can be controlled. We study…
We present the results of weak gravitational lensing statistics in four different cosmological $N$-body simulations. The data has been generated using an algorithm for the three-dimensional shear, which makes use of a variable softening…
We report the detection of a significant (5.5 sigma) excess of correlations between galaxy ellipticities at scales ranging from 0.5 to 3.5 arc-minutes. This detection of a gravitational lensing signal by large-scale structure was made using…
The light we observe from distant astrophysical objects including supernovae and quasars allows us to determine large distances in terms of a cosmological model. Despite the success of the standard cosmological model in fitting the data,…
Weak gravitational lensing is one of the key probes of cosmology. Cosmic shear surveys aimed at measuring the distribution of matter in the universe are currently being carried out (Pan-STARRS) or planned for the coming decade (DES, LSST,…
Recent cosmic shear analyses have exhibited discrepancies of up to $1\sigma$ between the inferred cosmological parameters when analyzing summary statistics in real space versus harmonic space. In this paper, we demonstrate the consistent…
We explore the stability of the variance and skewness of the cosmic gravitational convergence field, using two different approaches: first we simulate a whole MEGACAM survey (100 sq. degrees). The reconstructed mass map, obtained from a…
Current measurements of the weak lensing signal induced by large scale structure provide useful constraints on a range of cosmological parameters. However, the ultimate succes of this technique depends on the accuracy with which one can…
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,…
We identify and study a previously unknown systematic effect on cosmic shear measurements, caused by the selection of galaxies used for shape measurement, in particular the rejection of close (blended) galaxy pairs. We use ray-tracing…
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 show how the combination of observations related to strong gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics in ellipticals offers a new way to measure the cosmological matter and dark-energy density parameters. A gravitational lensing estimate…
Galaxies, diffuse gas, and dark matter make up the cosmic web that defines the large-scale structure of the Universe. We constrained the joint distribution of these constituents by cross-correlating galaxy samples binned by stellar mass…
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…