Towards emulating cosmic shear data: revisiting the calibration of the shear measurements for the Kilo-Degree Survey

¹ Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, PO Box 9513 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
e-mail: arunkannawadi@strw.leidenuniv.nl
² Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Keble Road, OX1 3RH Oxford, UK
³ Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy, University of Malta, Msida, MSD 2080, Malta
⁴ Department of Physics, University of Malta, Msida, MSD 2080, Malta
⁵ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA
⁶ Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, Auf dem Hügel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany
⁷ Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill, EH9 3HJ Edinburgh, UK
⁸ Astronomisches Institut, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsstr. 150, 44801 Bochum, Germany

Received: 10 December 2018
Accepted: 8 February 2019

Abstract

Exploiting the full statistical power of future cosmic shear surveys will necessitate improvements to the accuracy with which the gravitational lensing signal is measured. We present a framework for calibrating shear with image simulations that demonstrates the importance of including realistic correlations between galaxy morphology, size, and more importantly, photometric redshifts. This realism is essential to ensure that selection and shape measurement biases can be calibrated accurately for a tomographic cosmic shear analysis. We emulate Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) observations of the COSMOS field using morphological information from Hubble Space Telescope imaging, faithfully reproducing the measured galaxy properties from KiDS observations of the same field. We calibrate our shear measurements from lensfit, and find through a range of sensitivity tests that lensfit is robust and unbiased within the allowed two per cent tolerance of our study. Our results show that the calibration has to be performed by selecting the tomographic samples in the simulations, consistent with the actual cosmic shear analysis, because the joint distributions of galaxy properties are found to vary with redshift. Ignoring this redshift variation could result in misestimating the shear bias by an amount that exceeds the allowed tolerance. To improve the calibration for future cosmic shear analyses, it will also be essential to correctly account for the measurement of photometric redshifts, which requires simulating multi-band observations.