Cosmic shear from STIS pure parallels II. Analysis

We report on the marginal detection of cosmic shear on sub-arcmin scales with archive data from the STIS camera on board HST. For the measurement 121 galaxy fields with a field of view of 51'' x 51'' are used to obtain an rms cosmic shear of ~ 4% with 1.5sigma significance. This...

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Published inAstronomy and astrophysics (Berlin) Vol. 385; no. 3; pp. 743 - 760
Main Authors Hämmerle, H., Miralles, J.-M., Schneider, P., Erben, T., Fosbury, R. A. E., Freudling, W., Pirzkal, N., Jain, B., White, S. D. M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published EDP Sciences 01.04.2002
Subjects
Sciences of the Universe
COSMOLOGY: THEORY
Astrophysics
DARK MATTER
GRAVITATIONAL LENSING
LARGE-SCALE STRUCTURE OF UNIVERSE
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Summary:We report on the marginal detection of cosmic shear on sub-arcmin scales with archive data from the STIS camera on board HST. For the measurement 121 galaxy fields with a field of view of 51'' x 51'' are used to obtain an rms cosmic shear of ~ 4% with 1.5sigma significance. This value is consistent with groundbased results obtained by other groups on larger scales, and with theoretical predictions for a standard Lambda CDM cosmology. To show the suitability of STIS for weak shear measurements we carefully investigated the stability of the PSF. We demonstrate that small temporal changes do not affect the cosmic shear measurement by more than ~ 10%. We also discuss the influence of various weighting and selection schemes for the galaxy ellipticities. Based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and from the data archive at the STScI, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555.
ISSN:0004-6361
1432-0746
1432-0756
DOI:10.1051/0004-6361:20020195