Cosmology

Abstract:

We present a weak gravitational lensing analysis of 815 deg2of i-band imaging from the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS-i-800). In contrast to the deep r-band observations, which take priority during excellent seeing conditions and form the primary KiDS data set (KiDS-r-450), the complementary yet shallower KiDS-i-800 spans a wide range of observing conditions. The overlapping KiDS-i-800 and KiDS-r-450 imaging therefore provides a unique opportunity to assess the robustness of weak lensing measurements. In our analysis we introduce two new 'null' tests. The 'nulled' two-point shear correlation function uses a matched catalogue to show that the calibrated KiDS-i-800 and KiDS-r-450 shear measurements agree at the level of 1 ± 4 per cent.We use five galaxy lens samples to determine a 'nulled' galaxy-galaxy lensing signal from the full KiDS-i-800 and KiDS-r-450 surveys and find that the measurements agree to 7 ± 5 per cent when the KiDS-i-800 source redshift distribution is calibrated using either spectroscopic redshifts, or the 30-band photometric redshifts from the COSMOS survey.

Abstract:

By studying the large-scale structure of the bright high-redshift Lyman-break galaxy (LBG) population it is possible to gain an insight into the role of environment in galaxy formation physics in the early Universe. We measure the clustering of a sample of bright ($-22.7

Abstract:

We present cosmological parameter constraints from a joint analysis of three cosmological probes: the tomographic cosmic shear signal in~450 deg2of data from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS), the galaxy-matter cross-correlation signal of galaxies from the Galaxies And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey determined with KiDS weak lensing, and the angular correlation function of the same GAMA galaxies. We use fast power spectrum estimators that are based on simple integrals over the real-space correlation functions, and show that they are practically unbiased over relevant angular frequency ranges. We test our full pipeline on numerical simulations that are tailored to KiDS and retrieve the input cosmology. By fitting different combinations of power spectra, we demonstrate that the three probes are internally consistent. For all probes combined, we obtain S8≡ σ8√ Ωm/0.3 = 0.800-0.027+0.029, consistent with Planck and the fiducial KiDS-450 cosmic shear correlation function results. Marginalizing over wide priors on the mean of the tomographic redshift distributions yields consistent results for S8with an increase of 28 per cent in the error. The combination of probes results in a 26 per cent reduction in uncertainties of S8over using the cosmic shear power spectra alone. The main gain from these additional probes comes through their constraining power on nuisance parameters, such as the galaxy intrinsic alignment amplitude or potential shifts in the redshift distributions, which are up to a factor of 2 better constrained compared to using cosmic shear alone, demonstrating the value of large-scale structure probe combination.