Accurate Shear Measurement with Faint Sources [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5514


For cosmic shear to become an accurate cosmological probe, systematic errors in the shear measurement method must be unambiguously identified and corrected for. Previous work of this series has demonstrated that cosmic shears can be measured accurately in Fourier space in the presence of background noise and finite pixel size, without assumptions on the morphologies of galaxy and PSF. The remaining major source of error is source Poisson noise, due to the finiteness of source photon number. This problem is particularly important for faint galaxies in space-based weak lensing measurements. In this work, we propose a simple and rigorous way of removing the shear bias from the source Poisson noise. Our noise treatment can be generalized for images made of multiple exposures through MultiDrizzle. This is demonstrated with the COSMOS/ACS data. With a large ensemble of mock galaxy images of unrestricted morphologies, we show that our shear measurement method can achieve sub-percent accuracy even for images of signal-to-noise ratio less than 5 in general, making it the most promising technique for cosmic shear measurement in the ongoing and upcoming large scale galaxy surveys.

Read this paper on arXiv…

Fri, 20 Dec 13
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