Eric Suchyta: Digging Deeper (and More Greedily) in Imaging Surveys

Wednesday 14 Oct 2015, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Madrid

Seminar (IFAE)

Jelena Aleksic (IFAE), Joern Lange (IFAE Barcelona), Stefania Bordoni (IFAE)

Wide-field imaging surveys are at the forefront of modern astronomy research, collecting larger and larger samples to constrain the physical properties of our Universe. Fully utilizing the increased statistical precision of these surveys requires tight control of systematic errors, in low signal-to-noise regimes. I will present new methodology, including a simulation toolkit called Balrog, designed to help maximize scientific return in imaging surveys. I will present recent galaxy clustering results from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) using our methodology, demonstrating that the results are in excellent agreement with the best-available external cross-check. It is the first-ever measurement of this kind for the faintest galaxies in an imaging survey, offering the potential to more than double the available sample size, and accordingly improve constraints made by DES. We expect our general approach to be useful in many other contexts as well.