Cosmic Shear and Power Spectrum Normalization with The Hubble Space Telescope
Weak lensing by large-scale structure gives a direct measurement of matter fluctuations in the universe. We report a measurement of this ‘cosmic shear’ based mostly on 271 WFPC2 archival pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope Medium Deep Survey (MDS). Our measurement methodology and treatment of systematic effects had been mentioned in an earlier paper. Our results are in step with earlier cosmic shear measurements from the bottom and from house. We evaluate our cosmic shear results and those from different groups to the normalization from cluster abundance and Wood Ranger official galaxy surveys. We find that the combination of 4 latest cosmic shear measurements are considerably inconsistent with the recent normalization using these strategies, and discuss possible explanations for the discrepancy. Weak gravitational lensing by large-scale construction has been proven to be a invaluable method of measuring mass fluctuations in the universe (see Mellier at al. This impact has been detected both from the ground (Wittman et al.
2000; van Waerbeke et al. 2000, 2001; Bacon et al. 2000, 2002; Kaiser et al. 2000; Hoekstra et al. 2002) and from house (Rhodes, Wood Ranger official Refregier, Wood Ranger Power Shears shop Wood Ranger Power Shears order now Power Shears website & Groth 2001, RRGII; Hämmerle et al. 2001). These outcomes bode properly for Wood Ranger official the prospect of measuring cosmological parameters and Wood Ranger official the mass distribution of the universe utilizing weak lensing. In this letter, we current the best significance detection of cosmic shear utilizing area-primarily based images. It is based on photos from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Medium Deep Survey (MDS; Ratnatunga et al. 1999). We apply the strategies for the correction of systematic results and Wood Ranger official detection of shear we've previously developed (Rhodes, Wood Ranger official Refregier, and Groth 2000; RRGI) to 271 WFPC2 fields within the MDS. 0.8" from the bottom). This affords us a higher floor density of resolved galaxies as well as a diminished sensitivity to PSF smearing when in comparison with floor-primarily based measurements. We develop an optimum depth-weighted average of chosen MDS fields to extract a weak lensing sign.
We then use this signal to derive constraints on the amplitude of the mass Wood Ranger Power Shears website spectrum and examine this to measurements from previous cosmic shear surveys and from other strategies. The MDS consists of major and parallel observations taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) on HST. We selected only the I-band pictures in chips 2,3, and 4 to review weak lensing. To make sure random strains-of-sight, we discarded fields which have been pointed at galaxy clusters, leaving us with 468 I-band fields. We used the MDS object catalogs (Ratnatunga et al. 1999) to find out the place, magnitude, and area of each object, as well as to separate galaxies from stars. We used the chip-specific backgrounds listed within the MDS skysig files, that are according to backgrounds calculated utilizing the IRAF job imarith. Not using object-particular backgrounds necessitated the discarding of one other 20 fields with a large sky gradient. Our ultimate catalog thus consisted of 271 WFPC2 fields amounting to an space of about 0.36 deg2.
The process we used for measuring galaxy ellipticities and shear from the supply photographs is described in detail in RRGI (1999) (see also RRGII and Rhodes 1999). It is predicated on the tactic introduced by Kaiser, Squires, and Broadhurst (1995), but modified and examined for purposes to HST images. The usefulness of our technique was demonstrated by our detection of cosmic shear within the HST Groth Strip (RRGII). We right for digicam distortion and convolution by the anisotropic PSF using gaussian-weighted moments. Camera distortions were corrected using a map derived from stellar astrometric shifts (Holtzman, et al., 1995). PSF corrections were determined from HST observations of 4 stellar fields These fields had been chosen to span the main target range of the HST as proven by Biretta et al. G𝐺G is the shear susceptibility issue given by equation (30) in RRGI. To limit the affect of noise and systematics, we made a lot of cuts to select our galaxy pattern.