Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract:

Using the light-cone from the cosmological hydrodynamical simulation HORIZON-AGN, we produced a photometric catalogue over 0 < z < 4 with apparent magnitudes in COSMOS, Dark Energy Survey, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)-like, and Euclid-like filters at depths comparable to these surveys. The virtual photometry accounts for the complex star formation history (SFH) and metal enrichment of HORIZON-AGN galaxies, and consistently includes magnitude errors, dust attenuation, and absorption by intergalactic medium. The COSMOS-like photometry is fitted in the same configuration as the COSMOS2015 catalogue. We then quantify random and systematic errors of photometric redshifts, stellar masses, and star formation rates (SFR). Photometric redshifts and redshift errors capture the same dependencies on magnitude and redshift as found in COSMOS2015, excluding the impact of source extraction. COSMOS-like stellar masses are well recovered with a dispersion typically lower than 0.1 dex. The simple SFHs and metallicities of the templates induce a systematic underestimation of stellar masses at z < 1.5 by at most 0.12 dex. SFR estimates exhibit a dust-induced bimodality combined with a larger scatter (typically between 0.2 and 0.6 dex). We also use our mock catalogue to predict photometric redshifts and stellar masses in future imaging surveys. We stress that adding Euclid near-infrared photometry to the LSST-like baseline improves redshift accuracy especially at the faint end and decreases the outlier fraction by a factor ∼2. It also considerably improves stellar masses, reducing the scatter up to a factor 3. It would therefore be mutually beneficial for LSST and Euclid to work in synergy.

Abstract:

© ESO 2019. We directly constrain the non-linear alignment (NLA) model of intrinsic galaxy alignments, analysing the most representative and complete flux-limited sample of spectroscopic galaxies available for cosmic shear surveys. We measure the projected galaxy position-intrinsic shear correlations and the projected galaxy clustering signal using high-resolution imaging from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) overlapping with the GAMA spectroscopic survey, and data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Separating samples by colour, we make no significant detection of blue galaxy alignments, constraining the blue galaxy NLA amplitude A IAB = 0.21 -0.36+0.37 to be consistent with zero. We make robust detections (∼9σ) for red galaxies, with A IAR = 3.18 -0.46+0.47 , corresponding to a net radial alignment with the galaxy density field, and we find no evidence for any scaling of alignments with galaxy luminosity. We provide informative priors for current and future weak lensing surveys, an improvement over de facto wide priors that allow for unrealistic levels of intrinsic alignment contamination. For a colour-split cosmic shear analysis of the final KiDS survey area, we forecast that our priors will improve the constraining power on S 8 and the dark energy equation of state w 0 , by up to 62% and 51%, respectively. Our results indicate, however, that the modelling of red/blue-split galaxy alignments may be insufficient to describe samples with variable central/satellite galaxy fractions.