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Register a new userIntrinsic galaxy shapes and alignments II: Modelling the intrinsic alignment contamination of weak lensing surveys
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Intrinsic galaxy alignments constitute the major astrophysical systematic of forthcoming weak gravitational lensing surveys but also yield unique insights into galaxy formation and evolution. We build analytic models for the distribution of galaxy shapes based on halo properties extracted from the Millennium Simulation, differentiating between early- and late-type galaxies as well as central galaxies and satellites. The resulting ellipticity correlations are investigated for their physical properties and compared to a suite of current observations. The best-faring model is then used to predict the intrinsic alignment contamination of planned weak lensing surveys. We find that late-type galaxy models generally have weak intrinsic ellipticity correlations, marginally increasing towards smaller galaxy separation and higher redshift. The signal for early-type models at fixed halo mass strongly increases by three orders of magnitude over two decades in galaxy separation, and by one order of magnitude from z=0 to z=2. The intrinsic alignment strength also depends strongly on halo mass, but not on galaxy luminosity at fixed mass, or galaxy number density in the environment. We identify models that are in good agreement with all observational data, except that all models over-predict alignments of faint early-type galaxies. The best model yields an intrinsic alignment contamination of a Euclid-like survey between 0.5-10% at z>0.6 and on angular scales larger than a few arcminutes. Cutting 20% of red foreground galaxies using observer-frame colours can suppress this contamination by up to a factor of two.
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The statistical properties of the ellipticities of galaxy images depend on how galaxies form and evolve, and therefore constrain models of galaxy morphology, which are key to the removal of the intrinsic alignment contamination of cosmological weak lensing surveys, as well as to the calibration of weak lensing shape measurements. We construct such models based on the halo properties of the Millennium Simulation and confront them with a sample of 90,000 galaxies from the COSMOS Survey, covering three decades in luminosity and redshifts out to z=2. The ellipticity measurements are corrected for effects of point spread function smearing, spurious image distortions, and measurement noise. Dividing galaxies into early, late, and irregular types, we find that early-type galaxies have up to a factor of two lower intrinsic ellipticity dispersion than late-type galaxies. None of the samples shows evidence for redshift evolution, while the ellipticity dispersion for late-type galaxies scales strongly with absolute magnitude at the bright end. The simulation-based models reproduce the main characteristics of the intrinsic ellipticity distributions although which model fares best depends on the selection criteria of the galaxy sample. We observe fewer close-to-circular late-type galaxy images in COSMOS than expected for a sample of randomly oriented circular thick disks and discuss possible explanations for this deficit.
Correlations between the intrinsic shapes of galaxies and the large-scale galaxy density field provide an important tool to investigate galaxy intrinsic alignments, which constitute a major astrophysical systematic in cosmological weak lensing (cosmic shear) surveys, but also yield insight into the formation and evolution of galaxies. We measure galaxy position-shape correlations in the MegaZ-LRG sample for more than 800,000 luminous red galaxies, making the first such measurement with a photometric redshift sample. In combination with a re-analysis of several spectroscopic SDSS samples, we constrain an intrinsic alignment model for early-type galaxies over long baselines in redshift (z ~ 0.7) and luminosity (4mag). We develop and test the formalism to incorporate photometric redshift scatter in the modelling. For r_p > 6 Mpc/h, the fits to galaxy position-shape correlation functions are consistent with the scaling with r_p and redshift of a revised, nonlinear version of the linear alignment model for all samples. An extra redshift dependence proportional to (1+z)^n is constrained to n=-0.3+/-0.8 (1sigma). To obtain consistent amplitudes for all data, an additional dependence on galaxy luminosity proportional to L^b with b=1.1+0.3-0.2 is required. The normalisation of the intrinsic alignment power spectrum is found to be (0.077 +/- 0.008)/rho_{cr} for galaxies at redshift 0.3 and r band magnitude of -22 (k- and evolution-corrected to z=0). Assuming zero intrinsic alignments for blue galaxies, we assess the bias on cosmological parameters for a tomographic CFHTLS-like lensing survey. Both the resulting mean bias and its uncertainty are smaller than the 1sigma statistical errors when using the constraints from all samples combined. The addition of MegaZ-LRG data reduces the uncertainty in intrinsic alignment bias on cosmological parameters by factors of three to seven. (abridged)
Correlations of galaxy ellipticities with large-scale structure, due to galactic tidal interactions, provide a potentially significant contaminant to measurements of cosmic shear. However, these intrinsic alignments are still poorly understood for galaxies at the redshifts typically used in cosmic shear analyses. For spiral galaxies, it is thought that tidal torquing is significant in determining alignments resulting in zero correlation between the intrinsic ellipticity and the gravitational potential in linear theory. Here, we calculate the leading-order correction to this result in the tidal-torque model from non-linear evolution, using second-order perturbation theory, and relate this to the contamination from intrinsic alignments to the recently-measured cross-correlation between galaxy ellipticities and the CMB lensing potential. On the scales relevant for CMB lensing observations, the squeezed limit of the gravitational bispectrum dominates the correlation. Physically, the large-scale mode that sources CMB lensing modulates the small-scale power and hence the intrinsic ellipticity, due to non-linear evolution. We find that the angular cross-correlation from tidal torquing has a very similar scale dependence as in the linear alignment model, believed to be appropriate for elliptical galaxies. The amplitude of the cross-correlation is predicted to depend strongly on the formation redshift, being smaller for galaxies that formed at higher redshift when the bispectrum of the gravitational potential was smaller. Finally, we make simple forecasts for constraints on intrinsic alignments from the correlation of forthcoming cosmic shear measurements with current CMB lensing measurements. We note that cosmic variance can be significantly reduced in measurements of the difference in the intrinsic alignments for elliptical and spiral galaxies if these can be separated (e.g., using colour).
We present a finely-binned tomographic weak lensing analysis of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey, CFHTLenS, mitigating contamination to the signal from the presence of intrinsic galaxy alignments via the simultaneous fit of a cosmological model and an intrinsic alignment model. CFHTLenS spans 154 square degrees in five optical bands, with accurate shear and photometric redshifts for a galaxy sample with a median redshift of zm =0.70. We estimate the 21 sets of cosmic shear correlation functions associated with six redshift bins, each spanning the angular range of 1.5<theta<35 arcmin. We combine this CFHTLenS data with auxiliary cosmological probes: the cosmic microwave background with data from WMAP7, baryon acoustic oscillations with data from BOSS, and a prior on the Hubble constant from the HST distance ladder. This leads to constraints on the normalisation of the matter power spectrum sigma_8 = 0.799 +/- 0.015 and the matter density parameter Omega_m = 0.271 +/- 0.010 for a flat Lambda CDM cosmology. For a flat wCDM cosmology we constrain the dark energy equation of state parameter w = -1.02 +/- 0.09. We also provide constraints for curved Lambda CDM and wCDM cosmologies. We find the intrinsic alignment contamination to be galaxy-type dependent with a significant intrinsic alignment signal found for early-type galaxies, in contrast to the late-type galaxy sample for which the intrinsic alignment signal is found to be consistent with zero.
We investigate the redshift evolution of the intrinsic alignments (IA) of galaxies in the texttt{MassiveBlackII} (MBII) simulation. We select galaxy samples above fixed subhalo mass cuts ($M_h>10^{11,12,13}~M_{odot}/h$) at $z=0.6$ and trace their progenitors to $z=3$ along their merger trees. Dark matter components of $z=0.6$ galaxies are more spherical than their progenitors while stellar matter components tend to be less spherical than their progenitors. The distribution of the galaxy-subhalo misalignment angle peaks at $sim10~mathrm{deg}$ with a mild increase with time. The evolution of the ellipticity-direction~(ED) correlation amplitude $omega(r)$ of galaxies (which quantifies the tendency of galaxies to preferentially point towards surrounding matter overdensities) is governed by the evolution in the alignment of underlying dark matter~(DM) subhaloes to the matter density of field, as well as the alignment between galaxies and their DM subhaloes. At scales $sim1~mathrm{cMpc}/h$, the alignment between DM subhaloes and matter overdensity gets suppressed with time, whereas the alignment between galaxies and DM subhaloes is enhanced. These competing tendencies lead to a complex redshift evolution of $omega(r)$ for galaxies at $sim1~mathrm{cMpc}/h$. At scales $>1~mathrm{cMpc}/h$, alignment between DM subhaloes and matter overdensity does not evolve significantly; the evolution of the galaxy-subhalo misalignment therefore leads to an increase in $omega(r)$ for galaxies by a factor of $sim4$ from $z=3$ to $0.6$ at scales $>1~mathrm{cMpc}/h$. The balance between competing physical effects is scale dependant, leading to different conclusions at much smaller scales($sim0.1~mathrm{Mpc}/h$).
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