Wide-Field Lensing Mass Maps from DES Science Verification Data: Methodology and Detailed Analysis

Vikram, V.; Chang, C.; Jain, Bhuvnesh; Bacon, David; Amara, Adam; Becker, M. R.; Bernstein, G. M.; Bonnett, C.; Bridle, Sarah; Brout, D.; Busha, Michael T.; Frieman, J.; Gaztañaga, E.; Hartley, W. G.; Jarvis, M.; Kacprzak, T.; Kovács, András; Lahav, O.; Leistedt, Boris; Lin, H.; Peiris, Hiranya V.; Rozo, Eduardo; Rykoff, E.S.; Sánchez, C.; Sheldon, E.; Troxel, M. A.; Zuntz, Joe; Abbott, T. M. C.; Abdalla, F. B.; Armstrong, R.; Banerji, M.; Bauer, A.; Benoit-Lévy, A.; Bertin, E.; Buckley-Geer, E.; Burke, D. L.; Capozzi, D.; Rosell, A. Carnero; Kind, M. Carrasco; Castander, F. J.; Crocce, M.; Cunha, C. E.; D’Andrea, C. B.; Costa, L. N. da; DePoy, D. L.; Desai, S.; Diehl, H. T.; Estrada, J.; Evrard, A. E.; Neto, A. Fausti; Fernández, E.; Flaugher, B.; Fosalba, P.; Gerdes, D. W.; Gruendl, R. A.; Honscheid, K.; James, DJ; Kent, S.; Kuehn, Kerry; Kuropatkin, N.; Li, T. S.; Maia, M. A. G.; Makler, M.; March, M.; Marshall, J. L.; Martini, Paul; Merritt, K. W.; Miller, C. J.; Miquel, R.; Neilsen, Eric H.; Nichol, R. C.; Nord, B.; Ogando, R.; Plazas, A. A.; Romer, A. K.; Sánchez, E.; Scarpine, V.; Sevilla-Noarbe, I.; Smith, R. C.; Soares-Santos, M.; Sobreira, F.; Suchyta, E.; Swanson, M. E. C.; Tarlè, G.; Thaler, J. J.; Thomas, D.; Walker, A. R.; Weller, J.

doi:10.48550/arxiv.1504.03002

Cited by 12 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 29 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For all these measurements, filament lensing, void lensing, and now elliptical halo lensing, we have relied heavily on the Sloan Digitial Sky Survey 1 (SDSS) shear catalogs of Sheldon et al (2009a). While new lensing measurements from the Dark Energy Survey 2 (DES) are starting to be released (Melchior et al 2015;Vikram et al 2015) (as well as the Kilo Degree Survey 3 and the Subaru 4 HSC survey), there is still more to be gleaned from the previous generation data of SDSS. Furthermore, the measurement techniques developed in these works will be useful to apply to DES and other cutting edge datasets in the near future.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lensing measurements of the ellipticity of luminous red galaxies dark matter haloes

Clampitt

Jain

2016

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Lensing measurements of the shapes of dark matter halos can provide tests of gravity theories and possible dark matter interactions. We measure the quadrupole weak lensing signal from the elliptical halos of 70,000 SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies. We use a new estimator that nulls the spherical halo lensing signal, isolating the shear due to anisotropy in the dark matter distribution. One of the two Cartesian components of our estimator is insensitive to the primary systematic, a spurious alignment of lens and source ellipticities, allowing us to make robust measurements of halo ellipticity. Our best-fit value for the ellipticity of the surface mass density is 0.24 ± 0.06, which translates to an axis ratio of 0.78. We rule out the hypothesis of no ellipticity at the 4σ confidence level, and ellipticity < 0.12 (axis ratio > 0.89) at the 2σ level. We discuss how our measurements of halo ellipticity are revised to higher values using estimates of the misalignment of mass and light from simulations. Finally, we apply the same techniques to a smaller sample of redMaPPer galaxy clusters and obtain a 3σ measurement of cluster ellipticity. We discuss how the improved signal to noise properties of our estimator can enable studies of halo shapes for different galaxy populations with upcoming surveys.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lensing measurements of the ellipticity of luminous red galaxies dark matter haloes

Clampitt

Jain

2016

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We applied this technique to the DES SV data and mapped the main sources of observational systematics, including the average properties of seeing, airmass, and sky sigma. These maps will be made publicly available in the forthcoming DES data releases, and are currently used in analyses of SV data (e.g., Vikram et al 2015;Crocce et al 2015;Jarvis et al 2015;Becker et al 2015;Giannantonio et al 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A number of maps were constructed for the DES-SV data, in order to capture the spatial fluctuations of the observing conditions and other observational quantities. They are used in numerous SV analyses to perform spatial null tests with the data (e.g., Vikram et al 2015;Crocce et al 2015;Jarvis et al 2015;Becker et al 2015;Giannantonio et al 2015). Figure 4 shows some of the main maps for the i band: the total exposure time, the mean sky sigma and total sky sigma, and the minimum, maximum and mean seeing.…”

Section: Application To Des Sv Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This operation is analogous to the construction of foreground templates for the analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) data 1 https://github.com/emhuff/Balrog (e.g., Tegmark 1997;Slosar, Seljak & Makarov 2004;Ade et al 2014). Such templates are used in numerous analyses of singleepoch surveys like SDSS, in particular galaxy and quasar clustering measurements (e.g., Tegmark et al 1998;Scranton et al 2002;Ross et al 2012;Ho et al 2012;Leistedt et al 2013;Leistedt & Peiris 2014;Agarwal et al 2014), and are being used in analyses of SV data (e.g., Vikram et al 2015;Crocce et al 2015;Jarvis et al 2015;Becker et al 2015;Giannantonio et al 2015). More generally, templates of potential sources of systematics can be used to carry out null tests with the data or model their contamination.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Mapping and Simulating Systematics Due to Spatially Varying Observing Conditions in Des Science Verification Data

Leistedt

Peiris

Elsner

et al. 2016

ApJS

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Spatially varying depth and the characteristics of observing conditions, such as seeing, airmass, or sky background, are major sources of systematic uncertainties in modern galaxy survey analyses, particularly in deep multi-epoch 1 surveys. We present a framework to extract and project these sources of systematics onto the sky, and apply it to the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to map the observing conditions of the Science Verification (SV) data. The resulting distributions and maps of sources of systematics are used in several analyses of DES-SV to perform detailed null tests with the data, and also to incorporate systematics in survey simulations. We illustrate the complementary nature of these two approaches by comparing the SV data with BCC-UFig, a synthetic sky catalog generated by forward-modeling of the DES-SV images. We analyze the BCC-UFig simulation to construct galaxy samples mimicking those used in SV galaxy clustering studies. We show that the spatially varying survey depth imprinted in the observed galaxy densities and the redshift distributions of the SV data are successfully reproduced by the simulation and are well-captured by the maps of observing conditions. The combined use of the maps, the SV data, and the BCC-UFig simulation allows us to quantify the impact of spatial systematics on N(z), the redshift distributions inferred using photometric redshifts. We conclude that spatial systematics in the SV data are mainly due to seeing fluctuations and are under control in current clustering and weak-lensing analyses. However, they will need to be carefully characterized in upcoming phases of DES in order to avoid biasing the inferred cosmological results. The framework presented here is relevant to all multi-epoch surveys and will be essential for exploiting future surveys such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will require detailed null tests and realistic end-to-end image simulations to correctly interpret the deep, high-cadence observations of the sky.

show abstract

“…The distribution of stellar matter is a biased tracer (Kaiser 1984) of the large scale structure in the Universe. Maps of the total mass, baryonic and dark matter combined, have now been created using weak lensing measurements from the DES (Vikram et al 2015).…”

Section: Density Defining Populationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental dependence of the galaxy stellar mass function in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification Data

Etherington,

Thomas,

Maraston

et al. 2017

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Measurements of the galaxy stellar mass function are crucial to understand the formation of galaxies in the Universe. In a hierarchical clustering paradigm it is plausible that there is a connection between the properties of galaxies and their environments. Evidence for environmental trends has been established in the local Universe. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) provides large photometric datasets that enable further investigation of the assembly of mass. In this study we use ∼ 3.2 million galaxies from the (South Pole Telescope) SPT-East field in the DES science verification (SV) dataset. From grizY photometry we derive galaxy stellar masses and absolute magnitudes, and determine the errors on these properties using Monte-Carlo simulations using the full photometric redshift probability distributions. We compute galaxy environments using a fixed conical aperture for a range of scales. We construct galaxy environment probability distribution functions and investigate the dependence of the environment errors on the aperture parameters. We compute the environment components of the galaxy stellar mass function for the redshift range 0.15 < z < 1.05. For z < 0.75 we find that the fraction of massive galaxies is larger in high density environment than in low density environments. We show that the low density and high density components converge with increasing redshift up to z ∼ 1.0 where the shapes of the mass function components are indistinguishable. Our study shows how high density structures build up around massive galaxies through cosmic time.

show abstract

Wide-Field Lensing Mass Maps from DES Science Verification Data: Methodology and Detailed Analysis

Cited by 12 publications

References 29 publications

Lensing measurements of the ellipticity of luminous red galaxies dark matter haloes

Lensing measurements of the ellipticity of luminous red galaxies dark matter haloes

Mapping and Simulating Systematics Due to Spatially Varying Observing Conditions in Des Science Verification Data

Environmental dependence of the galaxy stellar mass function in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification Data

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About