The first shear measurements from precision weak lensing

Abstract

ABSTRACT We present an end-to-end methodology to measure the effects of weak lensing on individual galaxy–galaxy systems exploiting their kinematic information. Using this methodology, we have measured a shear signal from the velocity fields of 18 weakly lensed galaxies. We selected a sample of systems based only on the properties of the sources, requiring them to be bright (apparent i-band magnitude <17.4) and in the nearby Universe ($z$ < 0.15). We have observed the velocity fields of the sources with WiFeS, an optical IFU on a 2.3 m telescope, and fitted them using a simple circular motion model with an external shear. We have measured an average shear of 〈γ〉 = 0.020 ± 0.008 compared to a predicted 〈γpred〉 = 0.005 obtained using median stellar-to-halo relationships from the literature. While still a statistical approach, our results suggest that this new weak lensing methodology can overcome some of the limitations of traditional stacking-based techniques. We describe in detail all the steps of the methodology and make publicly available all the velocity maps for the weakly lensed sources used in this study.