2004/03/31 by Christopher M. Hirata, Rachel Mandelbaum, Uroš Seljak +15 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy formation and evolution #Photometric redshift #Physics #Redshift #Sky #Weak gravitational lensing #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2004.08090.x
published as Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc. 353 (2004) 529 · 23 pages, 13 figures, matches MNRAS accepted version. This is a preprint of an Article accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. (c)2004 The Royal Astronomical Society
arxiv created 2004/06/02 · openalex publication_date 2004/09/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Galaxy–galaxy lensing has emerged as a powerful probe of the dark matter haloes of galaxies, but is subject to contamination if intrinsically aligned satellites of the lens galaxy are used as part of the source sample. We present a measurement of this intrinsic shear using 200 747 lens galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic sample and a sample of satellites selected using photometric redshifts. The mean intrinsic shear at transverse separations of 30–446 h−1 kpc is constrained to be −0.0062 < Δγ < +0.0066 (99.9 per cent confidence, including identified systematics), which limits contamination of the galaxy–galaxy lensing signal to at most ∼15 per cent on these scales. We present these limits as a function of transverse separation and lens luminosity. We furthermore investigate shear calibration biases in the SDSS, which can also affect galaxy–galaxy lensing, and conclude that the shear amplitude is calibrated to better than 18 per cent. This includes noise-induced calibration biases in the ellipticity, which are small for the sample considered here, but which can be more important if low signal-to-noise ratio or poorly resolved source galaxies are used.