Abstract
Large simulation efforts are required to provide synthetic galaxy catalogs for ongoing and upcoming cosmology surveys. These extragalactic catalogs are being used for many diverse purposes covering a wide range of scientific topics. In order to be useful, they must offer realistically complex information about the galaxies they contain. Hence, it is critical to implement a rigorous validation procedure that ensures that the simulated galaxy properties faithfully capture observations and delivers an assessment of the level of realism attained by the catalog. We present here a suite of validation tests that have been developed by the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC). We discuss how the inclusion of each test is driven by the scientific targets for static ground-based dark energy science and by the availability of suitable validation data. The validation criteria that are used to assess the performance of a catalog are flexible and depend on the science goals. We illustrate the utility of this suite by showing examples for the validation of cosmoDC2, the extragalactic catalog recently released for the LSST DESC second Data Challenge.
Highlights
We present here a suite of validation tests that have been developed by the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC)
We describe the implementation details and discuss the validation criteria set by the relevant LSST DESC Working Groups (WGs)
The validation criteria set by the LSST DESC weak lensing (WL) and large-scale structure (LSS) groups required that the number counts for cosmoDC2 lie within this grey band in the magnitude range 24 < r < 27.5, which is indicated by the vertical shade band in the figure
Summary
Within the collaboration, Working Groups (WGs) have been convened to develop and test a variety of scientific analyses and make forecasts for the precision with which the parameters describing the behavior of dark energy can be constrained (The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration 2018a) These activities would not be possible without an extensive and contemporaneous simulation campaign that is designed to provide synthetic galaxy catalogs with various levels of realism. 2 https://lsstdesc.org/pages/organization.html suite is representative of the set of tests required to evaluate the realism of synthetic galaxy catalogs targeted for studying dark energy science in optical imaging surveys, both and in the future. We present here a validation test suite designed to evaluate simulated galaxy catalogs that have been targeted for ground-based imaging surveys focused on dark energy science.
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