The intrinsic alignment of galaxies and its impact on weak gravitational lensing in an era of precision cosmology

DOI10.1016/J.PHYSREP.2014.11.001MaRDI QIDQ516863zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors M. A. Troxel, Mustapha Ishak

Publication date 15 March 2017

Published in Physics Reports (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6990

zbMATH Keywords

cosmologyintrinsic alignmentlarge-scale structureweak gravitational lensing

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Statistical astronomy (85A35) Astrophysical cosmology (85A40) Galactic and stellar structure (85A15)

Abstract: 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 of galaxies, e.g., cosmic shear that measures the minute distortions of background galaxy images by intervening cosmic structure. Weak lensing and cosmic shear promise to be a powerful probe of astrophysics and cosmology, constraining models of dark energy, measuring the evolution of structure in the universe, and testing theories of gravity on cosmic scales. However, the intrinsic alignment of galaxies -- their shape and orientation before being lensed -- may pose a great challenge to the use of weak gravitational lensing as an accurate cosmological probe, and has been identified as one of the primary physical systematic biases in cosmic shear studies. Correlations between this intrinsic alignment and the lensing signal can persist even for large physical separations, and isolating the effect of intrinsic alignment from weak lensing is not trivial. A great deal of work in the last two decades has been devoted to understanding and characterizing this intrinsic alignment, which is also a direct and complementary probe of structure formation and evolution in its own right. In this review, we report in a systematic way the state of our understanding of the intrinsic alignment of galaxies, with a particular emphasis on its large-scale impact on weak lensing measurements and methods for its isolation or mitigation. (Abridged)

Recommendations

• Intrinsic alignment boosting. Direct measurement of intrinsic alignments in cosmic shear data
• The removal of shear-ellipticity correlations from the cosmic shear signal via nulling techniques
• The removal of shear-ellipticity correlations from the cosmic shear signal - influence of photometric redshift errors on the nulling technique
• GALACTIC ANGULAR MOMENTA AND ANGULAR MOMENTUM CORRELATIONS IN THE COSMOLOGICAL LARGE-SCALE STRUCTURE
• Cosmological weak lensing

Cites work

• Cosmological tests of gravity
• Cosmological weak lensing
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• Gravitational lensing: a unique probe of dark matter and dark energy
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• The removal of shear-ellipticity correlations from the cosmic shear signal via nulling techniques
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Cited in

(23)

• Weak lensing deflection of three-point correlation functions
• Galaxy shape statistics in the effective field theory
• An EFT description of galaxy intrinsic alignments
• Beyond Limber: efficient computation of angular power spectra for galaxy clustering and weak lensing
• Primordial gravitational waves from galaxy intrinsic alignments
• Intrinsic alignment boosting. Direct measurement of intrinsic alignments in cosmic shear data
• Handbook for the GREAT08 challenge: an image analysis competition for cosmological lensing
• GALACTIC ANGULAR MOMENTA AND ANGULAR MOMENTUM CORRELATIONS IN THE COSMOLOGICAL LARGE-SCALE STRUCTURE
• A Lagrangian theory for galaxy shape statistics
• Efficient optimal reconstruction of linear fields and band-powers from cosmological data
• Galaxy imaging surveys as spin-sensitive detector for cosmological colliders
• Parity violation in weak interactions: how experiment can shape a theoretical framework
• Lagrangian approach to super-sample effects on biased tracers at field level: galaxy density fields and intrinsic alignments
• Field-level inference of galaxy intrinsic alignment from the SDSS-III BOSS survey
• Environmental dependence of ellipticity correlation functions of intrinsic alignments
• The removal of shear-ellipticity correlations from the cosmic shear signal via nulling techniques
• Cosmological weak lensing
• Intrinsic galaxy alignment from angular dependent primordial non-Gaussianity
• Cosmological simulation in tides: power spectra, halo shape responses, and shape assembly bias
• FAST-PT II: an algorithm to calculate convolution integrals of general tensor quantities in cosmological perturbation theory
• The removal of shear-ellipticity correlations from the cosmic shear signal - influence of photometric redshift errors on the nulling technique
• Direct probe of dark energy through gravitational lensing effect
• Quadratic shape biases in three-dimensional halo intrinsic alignments

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