Intrinsic alignments of galaxies around cosmic voids

d'Assignies D. William, Nora Elisa Chisari, Nico Hamaus, Sukhdeep Singh

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

The intrinsic alignments of galaxies, i.e. the correlation between galaxy shapes and their environment, are a major source of contamination for weak gravitational lensing surveys. Most studies of intrinsic alignments have so far focused on measuring and modelling the correlations of luminous red galaxies with galaxy positions or the filaments of the cosmic web. In this work, we investigate alignments around cosmic voids. We measure the intrinsic alignments of luminous red galaxies detected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey around a sample of voids constructed from those same tracers and with radii in the ranges: [20-30; 30-40; 40-50] h-1 Mpc and in the redshift range z = 0.4-0.8. We present fits to the measurements based on a linear model at large scales, and on a new model based on the void density profile inside the void and in its neighbourhood. We constrain the free scaling amplitude of our model at small scales, finding no significant alignment at 1σ for either sample. We observe a deviation from the null hypothesis, at large scales, of 2σ for voids with radii between 20 and 30 h-1 Mpc, and 1.5σ for voids with radii between 30 and 40 h-1 Mpc and constrain the amplitude of the model on these scales. We find no significant deviation at 1σ for larger voids. Our work is a first attempt at detecting intrinsic alignments of galaxy shapes around voids and provides a useful framework for their mitigation in future void lensing studies.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1985-1994
Number of pages10
JournalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Volume509
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.

Keywords

  • (cosmology) large-scale structure of Universe
  • data analysis
  • galaxies
  • gravitational lensing
  • methods
  • statistics
  • weak

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