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Johnston, Harry

Publications and source records attributed to Johnston, Harry.

Clustering of red sequence galaxies in the fourth data release of the Kilo-Degree Survey

We present a sample of luminous red sequence galaxies as the basis for a study of the large-scale structure in the fourth data release of the Kilo-Degree Survey. The selected galaxies are defined by a red sequence template, in the form of a data-driven model of the colour-magnitude relation conditioned on redshift. In this work, the red sequence template was built using the broad-band optical+near infrared photometry of KiDS-VIKING and the overlapping spectroscopic data sets. The selection process involved estimating the red sequence redshifts, assessing the purity of the sample and estimating the underlying redshift distributions of redshift bins. After performing the selection, we mitigated the impact of survey properties on the observed number density of galaxies by assigning photometric weights to the galaxies. We measured the angular two-point correlation function of the red galaxies in four redshift bins and constrain the large-scale bias of our red sequence sample assuming a fixed ΛCDM cosmology. We find consistent linear biases for two luminosity-threshold samples (‘dense’ and ‘luminous’). We find that our constraints are well characterised by the passive evolution model.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Forecasting the potential of weak lensing magnification to enhance LSST large-scale structure analyses

ABSTRACT Recent works have shown that weak lensing magnification must be included in upcoming large-scale structure analyses, such as for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), to avoid biasing the cosmological results. In this work, we investigate whether including magnification has a positive impact on the precision of the cosmological constraints, as well as being necessary to avoid bias. We forecast this using an LSST mock catalogue and a halo model to calculate the galaxy power spectra. We find that including magnification has little effect on the precision of the cosmological parameter constraints for an LSST galaxy clustering analysis, where the halo model parameters are additionally constrained by the galaxy luminosity function. In particular, we find that for the LSST gold sample (i < 25.3) including weak lensing magnification only improves the galaxy clustering constraint on Ωm by a factor of 1.03, and when using a very deep LSST mock sample (i < 26.5) by a factor of 1.3. Since magnification predominantly contributes to the clustering measurement and provides similar information to that of cosmic shear, this improvement would be reduced for a combined galaxy clustering and shear analysis. We also confirm that not modelling weak lensing magnification will catastrophically bias the cosmological results from LSST. Magnification must therefore be included in LSST large-scale structure analyses even though it does not significantly enhance the precision of the cosmological constraints.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗