1998/06/20 by M. Lombardi, Marco Lombardi, Giuseppe Bertin +3
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #Diverse Scientific and Engineering Research #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Scientific Research and Discoveries #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/9806282
17 pages, 8 figures. Uses A&A LaTeX style. Accepted for pubblication by A&A. Several changes made: new model for the lens; Sect. 7 and App. A. added
openalex publication_date 1998/06/20 · arxiv created 1998/12/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recently, it has been shown that it is possible to reconstruct the projected mass distribution of a cluster from weak lensing provided that both the geometry of the universe and the probability distribution of galaxy redshifts are known; actually, when additional photometric data are taken to be available, the galaxy redshift distribution could be determined jointly with the cluster mass from the weak lensing analysis. In this paper we develop, in the spirit of a ``thought experiment,'' a method to constrain the geometry of the universe from weak lensing, provided that the redshifts of the source galaxies are measured. The quantitative limits and merits of the method are discussed analytically and with a set of simulations, in relation to point estimation, interval estimation, and test of hypotheses for homogeneous Friedmann-Lemaitre models. The constraints turn out to be significant when a few thousand source galaxies are used.