The shape of dark matter haloes: results from weak lensing in the ultraviolet near-infrared optical Northern survey (UNIONS)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cold dark matter haloes are expected to be triaxial and so appear elliptical in projection. We use weak gravitational lensing from the Canada–France Imaging Survey (CFIS) component of the Ultraviolet Near-Infrared Optical Northern Survey (UNIONS) to measure the ellipticity of the dark matter haloes around Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (DR7) and from the CMASS and LOWZ samples of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), assuming their major axes are aligned with the stellar light. We find that DR7 LRGs with masses M ∼ 2.7 × 1013 M⊙ h−1 have halo ellipticities e = 0.46 ± 0.10. Expressed as a fraction of the galaxy's ellipticity, we find fh = 2.2 ± 0.6. For BOSS LRGs, the detection is of marginal significance: e = 0.20 ± 0.10 and fh = 0.7 ± 0.7. These results are in agreement with other measurements of halo ellipticity from weak lensing and, taken together with previous results, suggest an increase in halo ellipticity of 0.10 ± 0.06 per decade in halo mass. This trend agrees with the predictions from hydrodynamical simulations, which find that at higher halo masses, not only do dark matter haloes become more elliptical, but that the misalignment between the major axis of the stellar light in the central galaxy and that of the dark matter decreases.