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Register a new userImpact of Point Spread Function Higher Moments Error on Weak Gravitational Lensing
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Weak gravitational lensing is one of the most powerful tools for cosmology, while subject to challenges in quantifying subtle systematic biases. The Point Spread Function (PSF) can cause biases in weak lensing shear inference when the PSF model does not match the true PSF that is convolved with the galaxy light profile. Although the effect of PSF size and shape errors - i.e., errors in second moments - is well studied, weak lensing systematics associated with errors in higher moments of the PSF model require further investigation. The goal of our study is to estimate their potential impact for LSST weak lensing analysis. We go beyond second moments of the PSF by using image simulations to relate multiplicative bias in shear to errors in the higher moments of the PSF model. We find that the current level of errors in higher moments of the PSF model in data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) survey can induce a $sim 0.05 $ per cent shear bias, making this effect unimportant for ongoing surveys but relevant at the precision of upcoming surveys such as LSST.
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A fraction of the light observed from edge-on disk galaxies is polarized due to two physical effects: selective extinction by dust grains aligned with the magnetic field, and scattering of the anisotropic starlight field. Since the reflection and transmission coefficients of the reflecting and refracting surfaces in an optical system depend on the polarization of incoming rays, this optical polarization produces both (a) a selection bias in favor of galaxies with specific orientations and (b) a polarization-dependent PSF. In this work we build toy models to obtain for the first time an estimate for the impact of polarization on PSF shapes and the impact of the selection bias due to the polarization effect on the measurement of the ellipticity used in shear measurements. In particular, we are interested in determining if this effect will be significant for WFIRST. We show that the systematic uncertainties in the ellipticity components are $8times 10^{-5}$ and $1.1 times 10^{-4}$ due to the selection bias and PSF errors respectively. Compared to the overall requirements on knowledge of the WFIRST PSF ellipticity ($4.7times 10^{-4}$ per component), both of these systematic uncertainties are sufficiently close to the WFIRST tolerance level that more detailed studies of the polarization effects or more stringent requirements on polarization-sensitive instrumentation for WFIRST are required.
(abridged) We examine the spatial and temporal stability of the HST ACS Wide Field Camera (WFC) point spread function (PSF) using the two square degree COSMOS survey. We show that stochastic aliasing of the PSF necessarily occurs during `drizzling. This aliasing is maximal if the output pixel scale is equal to the input pixel scale of 0.05. We show that this source of PSF variation can be significantly reduced by choosing a Gaussian drizzle kernel and by setting the output pixel size to 0.03. We show that the PSF is temporally unstable, most likely due to thermal fluctuations in the telescopes focus. We find that the primary manifestation of this thermal drift in COSMOS images is an overall slow periodic focus change. Using a modified version of TinyTim, we create undistorted stars in a 30x30 grid across the ACS WFC CCDs. These PSF models are created for telescope focus values in the range -10 microns to +5 microns, thus spanning the allowed range of telescope focus values. We then use the approximately ten well measured stars in each COSMOS field to pick the best-fit focus value for each field. The TinyTim model stars are then used to perform PSF corrections for weak lensing allowing systematics due to incorrectly modeled PSFs to be greatly reduced. We have made the software for PSF modeling using our modified version of TinyTim available to the astronomical community. We show the effects of Charge Transfer Efficiency (CTE) degradation, which distorts the object in the readout direction, mimicking a weak lensing signal. We derive a parametric correction for the effect of CTE on the shapes of objects in the COSMOS field as a function of observation date, position within the ACS WFC field, and object flux.
We present a pedagogical review of the weak gravitational lensing measurement process and its connection to major scientific questions such as dark matter and dark energy. Then we describe common ways of parametrizing systematic errors and understanding how they affect weak lensing measurements. Finally, we discuss several instrumental systematics and how they fit into this context, and conclude with some future perspective on how progress can be made in understanding the impact of instrumental systematics on weak lensing measurements.
The robust estimation of the tiny distortions (shears) of galaxy shapes caused by weak gravitational lensing in the presence of much larger shape distortions due to the point-spread function (PSF) has been widely investigated. One major problem is that most galaxy shape measurement methods are subject to bias due to pixel noise in the images (noise bias). Noise bias is usually characterized using uncorrelated noise fields; however, real images typically have low-level noise correlations due to galaxies below the detection threshold, and some types of image processing can induce further noise correlations. We investigate the effective detection significance and its impact on noise bias in the presence of correlated noise for one method of galaxy shape estimation. For a fixed noise variance, the biases in galaxy shape estimates can differ substantially for uncorrelated versus correlated noise. However, use of an estimate of detection significance that accounts for the noise correlations can almost entirely remove these differences, leading to consistent values of noise bias as a function of detection significance for correlated and uncorrelated noise. We confirm the robustness of this finding to properties of the galaxy, the PSF, and the noise field, and quantify the impact of anisotropy in the noise correlations. Our results highlight the importance of understanding the pixel noise model and its impact on detection significances when correcting for noise bias on weak lensing.
We present a new method for the analysis of Abell 1835 observed by XMM-Newton. The method is a combination of the Direct Demodulation technique and deprojection. We eliminate the effects of the point spread function (PSF) with the Direct Demodulation technique. We then use a traditional depro-jection technique to study the properties of Abell 1835. Compared to that of deprojection method only, the central electron density derived from this method increases by 30%, while the temperature profile is similar.
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