Paper detail

Weak lensing mass estimates of galaxy groups and the line-of-sight contamination

Weak lensing is an important technique to determine the masses of galaxy groups. However, the distortion imprint on the shape of the background galaxies is affected by all the mass content along the line-of-sight. Using COSMOS shear mock data we study the shear profile of 165 groups and investigate the level at which the neighbouring groups can enhance or suppress the shear signal from the main halo. Our mock data are based on CFHT and Subaru observations and the information on the galaxy groups is taken from the COSMOS X-ray catalogue of extended sources. The expected gravitational shear field of these groups is calculated assuming that the haloes follow NFW density profiles. We conclude that, on average, the signal-to-noise for a detection of the main halo is affected by ~15%x\sqrt{ngal/30} with respect to the signal-to-noise the same halo would have if it was isolated in the sky. Groups with neighbours that are close in projected distance (<1') are the most affected, but haloes located at larger angular distances also cause a measurable shear signal, which can be interpreted as uncorrelated large-scale structure. The average bias in the mass excess estimate of individual groups that is introduced by the external haloes is zero with an rms of ~6-72%, depending on the aperture size used. The shear signal introduced by large-scale structure acts as an external source of noise. The averaged uncertainty introduced is σ_{γ_t}^{LSS}~0.006 per component for an aperture size of ~5', which corresponds to 1.8% of the one-component intrinsic ellipticity value. This large-scale structure noise error becomes equal to intrinsic ellipticity noise if there are measurements for ~3000 galaxies within a certain aperture, a number that is already achieved by current deep surveys such as COSMOS and, therefore, should not be ignored.