Engineering topics

Wagoner, Erika L.

Publications and source records attributed to Wagoner, Erika L..

4 records

DOE OSTI2021

Measuring cosmological distances using cluster edges as a standard ruler

ABSTRACT The line-of-sight velocity dispersion profile of galaxy clusters exhibits a ‘kink’ corresponding to the spatial extent of orbiting galaxies. Because the spatial extent of a cluster is correlated with the amplitude of the velocity dispersion profile, we can utilize this feature as a gravity-calibrated standard ruler. Specifically, the amplitude of the velocity dispersion data allows us to infer the physical cluster size. Consequently, observations of the angular scale of the ‘kink’ in the profile can be translated into a distance measurement to the cluster. Assuming the relation between cluster radius and cluster velocity dispersion can be calibrated from simulations, we forecast that with existing data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey we will be able to measure the Hubble constant with 3.0 per cent precision. Implementing our method with data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will result in a 1.3 per cent measurement of the Hubble constant. Adding cosmological supernova data improves the uncertainty of the DESI measurement to 0.7 per cent. While these error estimates are statistical only, they provide strong motivation for pursuing the necessary simulation program required to characterize and calibrate the systematic uncertainties impacting our proposed measurement. Whether or not our proposed measurement can in fact result in competitive H0 constraints will depend on what the eventual systematics floor for this method is.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2021

Linear systematics mitigation in galaxy clustering in the Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Data

ABSTRACT We implement a linear model for mitigating the effect of observing conditions and other sources of contamination in galaxy clustering analyses. Our treatment improves upon the fiducial systematics treatment of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 1 (Y1) cosmology analysis in four crucial ways. Specifically, our treatment (1) does not require decisions as to which observable systematics are significant and which are not, allowing for the possibility of multiple maps adding coherently to give rise to significant bias even if no single map leads to a significant bias by itself, (2) characterizes both the statistical and systematic uncertainty in our mitigation procedure, allowing us to propagate said uncertainties into the reported cosmological constraints, (3) explicitly exploits the full spatial structure of the galaxy density field to differentiate between cosmology-sourced and systematics-sourced fluctuations within the galaxy density field, and (4) is fully automated, and can therefore be trivially applied to any data set. The updated correlation function for the DES Y1 redMaGiC catalogue minimally impacts the cosmological posteriors from that analysis. Encouragingly, our analysis does improve the goodness-of-fit statistic of the DES Y1 3 × 2pt data set (Δχ2 = −6.5 with no additional parameters). This improvement is due in nearly equal parts to both the change in the correlation function and the added statistical and systematic uncertainties associated with our method. We expect the difference in mitigation techniques to become more important in future work as the size of cosmological data sets grows.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2020

Clusters have edges: the projected phase-space structure of SDSS redMaPPer clusters

ABSTRACT We study the distribution of line-of-sight velocities of galaxies in the vicinity of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) red-sequence Matched-filter Probabilistic Percolation (redMaPPer) galaxy clusters. Based on their velocities, galaxies can be split into two categories: galaxies that are dynamically associated with the cluster, and random line-of-sight projections. Both the fraction of galaxies associated with the galaxy clusters, and the velocity dispersion of the same, exhibit a sharp feature as a function of radius. The feature occurs at a radial scale Redge ≈ 2.2Rλ, where Rλ is the cluster radius assigned by redMaPPer. We refer to Redge as the ‘edge radius’. These results are naturally explained by a model that further splits the galaxies dynamically associated with a galaxy cluster into a component of galaxies orbiting the halo and an infalling galaxy component. The edge radius Redge constitutes a true ‘cluster edge’, in the sense that no orbiting structures exist past this radius. A companion paper tests whether the ‘halo edge’ hypothesis holds when investigating the full three-dimensional phase-space distribution of dark matter substructures in numerical simulations, and demonstrates that this radius coincides with a suitably defined splashback radius.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2020

Tomographic galaxy clustering with the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam first year public data release

We analyze the clustering of galaxies in the first public data release of the HSC Subaru Strategic Program. Despite the relatively small footprints of the observed fields, the data are an excellent proxy for the deep photometric datasets that will be acquired by LSST, and are therefore an ideal test bed for the analysis methods being implemented by the LSST DESC. We select a magnitude limited sample with i<24.5 and analyze it in four redshift bins covering 0.15≲z≲1.5. We carry out a Fourier-space analysis of the two-point clustering of this sample, including all auto- and cross-correlations. We demonstrate the use of map-level deprojection methods to account for fluctuations in the galaxy number density caused by observational systematics. Through an HOD analysis, we place constraints on the characteristic halo masses of this sample, finding a good fit up to scales k max = 1Mpc –1 , including both auto- and cross-correlations. Our results show monotonically decreasing average halo masses, which can be interpreted in terms of the drop-out of red galaxies at high redshifts for a flux-limited sample. In terms of photometric redshift systematics, we show that additional care is needed in order to marginalize over uncertainties in the redshift distribution in galaxy clustering, and that these uncertainties can be constrained by including cross-correlations. We are able to make a ~3σ detection of lensing magnification in the HSC data. Our results are stable to variations in σ 8 and Ω c and we find constraints that agree well with measurements from Planck and low-redshift probes. Lastly, we use our pipeline to study the clustering of galaxies as a function of limiting flux, and provide a simple fitting function for the linear galaxy bias for magnitude limited samples as a function of limiting magnitude and redshift.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗