Weak gravitational lensing shear measurement with FPFS: analytical mitigation of noise bias and selection bias

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dedicated ‘Stage IV’ observatories will soon observe the entire extragalactic sky, to measure the ‘cosmic shear’ distortion of galaxy shapes by weak gravitational lensing. To measure the apparent shapes of those galaxies, we present an improved version of the Fourier Power Function Shapelets (FPFS) shear measurement method. This now includes analytic corrections for sources of bias that plague all shape measurement algorithms: Including noise bias (due to noise in non-linear combinations of observable quantities) and selection bias (due to sheared galaxies being more or less likely to be detected). Crucially, these analytic solutions do not rely on calibration from external image simulations. For isolated galaxies, the small residual ${\sim}10^{-3}$ multiplicative bias and ${\lesssim}10^{-4}$ additive bias now meet science requirements for Stage IV experiments. FPFS also works accurately for faint galaxies and robustly against stellar contamination. Future work will focus on deblending overlapping galaxies. The code used for this paper can process ${\gt}1000$ galaxy images per CPU second and is available from https://github.com/mr-superonion/FPFS.