Large-scale structure and the intrinsic alignment of galaxies

Abstract

Coherent alignments of galaxy shapes, often called "intrinsic alignments" (IA), are the most significant source of astrophysical uncertainty in weak lensing measurements. We develop the tidal alignment model of IA and demonstrate its success in describing observational data. We also describe a technique to separate IA from galaxy-galaxy lensing measurements. Applying this technique to luminous red galaxy lenses in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we constrain potential IA contamination from associated sources to be below a few percent.

4 pages, 2 figures. Proceedings of IAU Symposium 308 "The Zeldovich Universe: Genesis and Growth of the Cosmic Web", 23-28 June 2014, Tallinn, Estonia

References in corpus (6)

• Dark energy constraints from cosmic shear power spectra: impact of intrinsic alignments on photometric redshift requirements
• Intrinsic galaxy alignments from the 2SLAQ and SDSS surveys: luminosity and redshift scalings and implications for weak lensing surveys
• Tidal alignment of galaxies
• Galaxy Shapes and Intrinsic Alignments in The MassiveBlack-II Simulation
• The Gravitational Shear--Intrinsic Ellipticity Correlation Functions of Luminous Red Galaxies in Observation and in the $\Lambda$CDM Model
• Separating intrinsic alignment and galaxy-galaxy lensing

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Primordial Gravitational Waves from Galaxy Intrinsic Alignments
• The evolution of galaxy intrinsic alignments in the MassiveBlack II universe