Galaxy blending effects in deep imaging cosmic shear probes of cosmology

Nourbakhsh, Erfan; Tyson, J. Anthony; Schmidt, Samuel J.; Armstrong, Bob; Burchat, Patricia; Sánchez, Javier

doi:10.1093/mnras/stac1303

Galaxy blending effects in deep imaging cosmic shear probes of cosmology

Journal Article · Tue May 17 04:00:00 EDT 2022 · Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac1303· OSTI ID:1876121

; ; ; Armstrong, Bob; Burchat, Patricia; Sánchez, Javier

ABSTRACT

Upcoming deep imaging surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time will be confronted with challenges that come with increased depth. One of the leading systematic errors in deep surveys is the blending of objects due to higher surface density in the more crowded images; a considerable fraction of the galaxies which we hope to use for cosmology analyses will overlap each other on the observed sky. In order to investigate these challenges, we emulate blending in a mock catalogue consisting of galaxies at a depth equivalent to 1.3 yr of the full 10-yr Rubin Observatory that includes effects due to weak lensing, ground-based seeing, and the uncertainties due to extraction of catalogues from imaging data. The emulated catalogue indicates that approximately 12 per cent of the observed galaxies are ‘unrecognized’ blends that contain two or more objects but are detected as one. Using the positions and shears of half a billion distant galaxies, we compute shear–shear correlation functions after selecting tomographic samples in terms of both spectroscopic and photometric redshift bins. We examine the sensitivity of the cosmological parameter estimation to unrecognized blending employing both jackknife and analytical Gaussian covariance estimators. An ∼0.025 decrease in the derived structure growth parameter S8 = σ8(Ωm/0.3)0.5 is seen due to unrecognized blending in both tomographies with a slight additional bias for the photo-z-based tomography. This bias is greater than the 2σ statistical error in measuring S8.

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Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE

Grant/Contract Number:: SC0009999; AC02-76SF00515; AC02-05CH11231

OSTI ID:: 1876121

Alternate ID(s):: OSTI ID: 1979537

Journal Information:: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Journal Name: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Journal Issue: 4 Vol. 514; ISSN 0035-8711

Publisher:: Oxford University PressCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United Kingdom

Language:: English

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