Sheer shear: weak lensing with one mode
The Open Journal of Astrophysics The Open Journal 2:1 (2019)
Simulating MOS science on the ELT: Ly alpha forest tomography
Astronomy and Astrophysics EDP Sciences 632:December 2019 (2019) A94
Abstract:
Mapping of the large-scale structure through cosmic time has numerous applications in the studies of cosmology and galaxy evolution. At $z > 2$, the structure can be traced by the neutral intergalactic medium (IGM) by way of observing the Ly$\alpha$, forest towards densely-sampled lines-of-sight of bright background sources, such as quasars and star forming galaxies. We investigate the scientific potential of MOSAIC, a planned multi-object spectrograph on the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), for the 3D mapping of the IGM at $z \gtrsim 3$. We simulate a survey of $3 \lesssim z \lesssim 4$ galaxies down to a limiting magnitude of $m_{r}\sim 25.5$ mag in an area of 1 degree$^2$ in the sky. Galaxies and their spectra (including the line-of-sight Ly$\alpha$ absorption) are taken from the lightcone extracted from the Horizon-AGN cosmological hydrodynamical simulation. The quality of the reconstruction of the original density field is studied for different spectral resolutions and signal-to-noise ratios of the spectra. We demonstrate that the minimum $S/N$ (per resolution element) of the faintest galaxies that such survey has to reach is $S/N = 4$. We show that a survey with such sensitivity enables a robust extraction of cosmic filaments and the detection of the theoretically-predicted galaxy stellar mass and star-formation rate gradients towards filaments. By simulating the realistic performance of MOSAIC we obtain $S/N(T_{\rm obs}, R, m_{r})$ scaling relations. We estimate that $\lesssim 35~(65)$ nights of observation time are required to carry out the survey with the instrument's high multiplex mode and with the spectral resolution of $R=1000~(2000)$. A survey with a MOSAIC-concept instrument on the ELT is found to enable the mapping of the IGM at $z > 3$ on Mpc scales, and as such will be complementary to and competitive with other planned IGM tomography surveys. [abridged]LyaCoLoRe: Synthetic Datasets for Current and Future Lyman-${\alpha}$ Forest BAO Surveys
(2019)
Developing a unified pipeline for large-scale structure data analysis with angular power spectra -- II. A case study for magnification bias and radio continuum surveys
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 491, Issue 4, February 2020, Pages 4869–4883
Abstract:
Following on our purpose of developing a unified pipeline for large-scale structure data analysis with angular power spectra, we now include the weak lensing effect of magnification bias on galaxy clustering in a publicly available, modular parameter estimation code. We thus forecast constraints on the parameters of the concordance cosmological model, dark energy, and modified gravity theories from galaxy clustering tomographic angular power spectra. We find that a correct modelling of magnification is crucial not to bias the parameter estimation, especially in the case of deep galaxy surveys. Our case study adopts specifications of the Evolutionary Map of the Universe, which is a full-sky, deep radio-continuum survey, expected to probe the Universe up to redshift z ∼ 6. We assume the Limber approximation, and include magnification bias on top of density fluctuations and redshift-space distortions. By restricting our analysis to the regime where the Limber approximation holds true, we significantly minimize the computational time needed, compared to that of the exact calculation. We also show that there is a trend for more biased parameter estimates from neglecting magnification when the redshift bins are very wide. We conclude that this result implies a strong dependence on the lensing contribution, which is an integrated effect and becomes dominant when wide redshift bins are considered. Finally, we note that instead of being considered a contaminant, magnification bias encodes important cosmological information, and its inclusion leads to an alleviation of its degeneracy between the galaxy bias and the amplitude normalization of the matter fluctuations.
Reionization history constraints from neural network based predictions of high-redshift quasar continua
(2019)