Weak lensing measurement of filamentary structure with the SDSS BOSS and Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam data

Abstract

ABSTRACT We report the weak lensing measurement of filaments between Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) III/Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) CMASS galaxy pairs at z ∼ 0.55, using the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) first-year galaxy shape catalogue. Despite of the small overlap of 140 deg2 between these surveys, we detect the filament lensing signal at 3.9σ significance, which is the highest signal-to-noise lensing measurement of filaments between galaxy-scale haloes at this redshift range. We derive a theoretical prediction and covariance using mock catalogues based on full-sky ray-tracing simulations. We find that the intrinsic scatter of filament properties and the fluctuations in a large-scale structure along the line of sight are the primary component of the covariance and the intrinsic shape noise from source galaxies no longer limits our lensing measurement. This fact demonstrates the statistical power of the HSC survey due to its deep observations and high number density of source galaxies. Our result is consistent with the theoretical prediction and supports the ‘thick’ filament model. As the HSC survey area increases, we will be able to study detailed filament properties such as the dark matter distributions and redshift evolution of filaments.