Validating Synthetic Galaxy Catalogs for Dark Energy Science in the LSST Era

Abstract

Large simulation efforts are required to provide synthetic galaxy catalogs for ongoing and upcoming cosmology surveys. These extragalactic catalogs are being used for many diverse purposes covering a wide range of scientific topics. In order to be useful, they must offer realistically complex information about the galaxies they contain. Hence, it is critical to implement a rigorous validation procedure that ensures that the simulated galaxy properties faithfully capture observations and delivers an assessment of the level of realism attained by the catalog. We present here a suite of validation tests that have been developed by the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC). We discuss how the inclusion of each test is driven by the scientific targets for static ground-based dark energy science and by the availability of suitable validation data. The validation criteria that are used to assess the performance of a catalog are flexible and depend on the science goals. We illustrate the utility of this suite by showing examples for the validation of cosmoDC2, the extragalactic catalog recently released for the LSST DESC second Data Challenge.

46 pages, 33 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing
• The Buzzard Flock: Dark Energy Survey Synthetic Sky Catalogs
• CLMM: a LSST-DESC Cluster weak Lensing Mass Modeling library for cosmology
• The effect of emission lines on the performance of photometric redshift estimation algorithms

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• Simulating image coaddition with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope: III. Software improvements and new linear algebra strategies
• YOLO-CL cluster detection in the Rubin/LSST DC2 simulation
• Optimizing the Roman Space Telescope High-Latitude Wide Area Survey for mitigating chromatic PSF effects on shear measurement