Detection of weak gravitational lensing distortions of distant galaxies by cosmic dark matter at large scales

Wittman, David; Tyson, J. A.; Kirkman, David; Dell’Antonio, Ian; Bernstein, G. M.

doi:10.1038/35012001

Cited by 559 publications

(550 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

538

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Mould et al (1994) searched for cosmic shear and reached percent-level sensitivity, but did not detect a signal. Cosmic shear was finally detected in 2000 by several groups (Wittman et al, 2000;Bacon et al, 2000;Van Waerbeke et al, 2000), and in deeper but narrower data from HST (Rhodes et al, 2001;Refregier et al, 2002). Over the same period, several additional square degrees were observed with long exposure times in excellent seeing using ground-based telescopes (Van Waerbeke et al, 2001Bacon et al, 2003;Hamana et al, 2003).…”

Section: Cosmic Shearmentioning

confidence: 95%

Observational probes of cosmic acceleration

et al. 2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The accelerating expansion of the universe is the most surprising cosmological discovery in many decades, implying that the universe is dominated by some form of "dark energy" with exotic physical properties, or that Einstein's theory of gravity breaks down on cosmological scales. The profound implications of cosmic acceleration have inspired ambitious efforts to understand its origin, with experiments that aim to measure the history of expansion and growth of structure with percent-level precision or higher. We review in detail the four most well established methods for making such measurements: Type Ia supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), weak gravitational lensing, and the abundance of galaxy clusters. We pay particular attention to the systematic uncertainties in these techniques and to strategies for controlling them at the level needed to exploit "Stage IV" dark energy facilities such as BigBOSS, LSST, Euclid, and WFIRST. We briefly review a number of other approaches including redshift-space distortions, the Alcock-Paczynski effect, and direct measurements of the Hubble constant H 0 . We present extensive forecasts for constraints on the dark energy equation of state and parameterized deviations from General Relativity, achievable with Stage III and Stage IV experimental programs that incorporate supernovae, BAO, weak lensing, and cosmic microwave background data. We also show the level of precision required for clusters or other methods to provide constraints competitive with those of these fiducial programs. We emphasize the value of a balanced program that employs several of the most powerful methods in combination, both to cross-check systematic uncertainties and to take advantage of complementary information. Surveys to probe cosmic acceleration produce data sets that support a wide range of scientific investigations, and they continue the longstanding astronomical tradition of mapping the universe in ever greater detail over ever larger scales.

show abstract

Section: Cosmic Shearmentioning

confidence: 95%

Observational probes of cosmic acceleration

et al. 2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The first detections of cosmic shear on wide-field imaging data (Bacon et al 2000(Bacon et al , 2002Kaiser et al 2000;van Waerbeke et al 2000van Waerbeke et al , 2001van Waerbeke et al , 2002Wittman et al 2000;Maoli et al 2001;Rhodes et al 2001;Hämmerle et al 2002;Hoekstra et al 2002;Refregier et al 2002) has demonstrated the feasibility of this new window of observational cosmology, and yielded already the first constraints on cosmological parameters, most noticibly the normalization σ 8 of the dark matter power spectrum, but also on the matter density parameter Ω m Hoekstra et al 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of two-point statistics of cosmic shear

Schneider

Waerbeke

Kilbinger

et al. 2002

A&A

226

353

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract.Recently, cosmic shear, the weak lensing effect by the inhomogeneous matter distribution in the Universe, has not only been detected by several groups, but the observational results have been used to derive constraints on cosmological parameters. For this purpose, several cosmic shear statistics have been employed. As shown recently, all second-order statistical measures can be expressed in terms of the two-point correlation functions of the shear, which thus represents the basic quantity; also, from a practical point-of-view, the two-point correlation functions are easiest to obtain from observational data which typically have complicated geometry. We derive in this paper expressions for the covariance matrix of the cosmic shear twopoint correlation functions which are readily applied to any survey geometry. Furthermore, we consider the more special case of a simple survey geometry which allows us to obtain approximations for the covariance matrix in terms of integrals which are readily evaluated numerically. These results are then used to study the covariance of the aperture mass dispersion which has been employed earlier in quantitative cosmic shear analyses. We show that the aperture mass dispersion, measured at two different angular scales, quickly decorrelates with the ratio of the scales. Inverting the relation between the shear two-point correlation functions and the power spectrum of the underlying projected matter distribution, we construct estimators for the power spectrum and for the band powers, and show that they yields accurate approximations; in particular, the correlation between band powers at different wave numbers is quite weak. The covariance matrix of the shear correlation function is then used to investigate the expected accuracy of cosmological parameter estimates from cosmic shear surveys. Depending on the use of prior information, e.g. from CMB measurements, cosmic shear can yield very accurate determinations of several cosmological parameters, in particular the normalization σ 8 of the power spectrum of the matter distribution, the matter density parameter Ω m , and the shape parameter Γ.

show abstract

“…Gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), for instance, was first detected (Smith et al 2007) by cross-correlating noisy CMB lensing maps with a catalog of radio galaxies. Similarly, in the context of galaxy lensing, the cross-correlation of lensing induced shearing of background galaxies with the positions of foreground galaxies (known as galaxy-galaxy lensing) was detected (Brainerd et al 1996) before shearshear correlations (Bacon et al 2000;Kaiser et al 2000;Van Waerbeke et al 2000;Wittman et al 2000). Furthermore, lensing-tracer cross-correlation measurements are typically less sensitive to additive systematic errors since these will tend to average to zero in the cross-correlation (assuming the sources of systematic error are uncorrelated between the lensing measurements and the tracer measurements, often a reasonable approximation).…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Joint measurement of lensing–galaxy correlations using SPT and DES SV data

Baxter

Clampitt

Giannantonio

et al. 2016

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We measure the correlation of galaxy lensing and cosmic microwave background lensing with a set of galaxies expected to trace the matter density field. The measurements are performed using pre-survey Dark Energy Survey (DES) Science Verification optical imaging data and millimeter-wave data from the 2500 square degree South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SPT-SZ) survey. The two lensing-galaxy correlations are jointly fit to extract constraints on cosmological parameters, constraints on the redshift distribution of the lens galaxies, and constraints on the absolute shear calibration of DES galaxy lensing measurements. We show that an attractive feature of these fits is that they are fairly insensitive to the clustering bias of the galaxies used as matter tracers. The measurement presented in this work confirms that DES and SPT data are consistent with each other and with the currently favored ΛCDM cosmological model. It also demonstrates that joint lensing-galaxy correlation measurement considered here contains a wealth of information that can be extracted using current and future surveys.

show abstract

Detection of weak gravitational lensing distortions of distant galaxies by cosmic dark matter at large scales

Cited by 559 publications

References 33 publications

Observational probes of cosmic acceleration

Observational probes of cosmic acceleration

Analysis of two-point statistics of cosmic shear

Joint measurement of lensing–galaxy correlations using SPT and DES SV data

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About