Journal article
CORRECTING THE z ∼ 8 GALAXY LUMINOSITY FUNCTION FOR GRAVITATIONAL LENSING MAGNIFICATION BIAS
CA Mason, T Treu, KB Schmidt, TE Collett, M Trenti, PJ Marshall, R Barone-Nugent, LD Bradley, M Stiavelli, S Wyithe
Astrophysical Journal | Published : 2015
Abstract
We present a Bayesian framework to account for the magnification bias from both strong and weak gravitational lensing in estimates of high-redshift galaxy luminosity functions (LFs). We illustrate our method by estimating the z ∼ 8 UV LF using a sample of 97 Y-band dropouts (Lyman break galaxies) found in the Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies (BoRG) survey and from the literature. We find the LF is well described by a Schechter function with characteristic magnitude of , faint-end slope of , and number density of . These parameters are consistent within the uncertainties with those inferred from the same sample without accounting for the magnification bias, demonstrating that the effect is sm..
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Awarded by HST BoRG
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Joey Munoz for useful discussions and providing his LF evolution model; Peter Behroozi for providing his LF evolution model; Sirio Belli for providing photometry of the galaxies described in Belli et al. (2014a, 2014b); and Stefan Hilbert for useful comments regarding the weak lensing simulations. This work was supported by the HST BoRG grants GO-11700, 12572, and 12905. This paper is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute. This work made use of the freely available Pangloss code, written by Tom Collett and Phil Marshall. The Millennium Simulation databases used in this paper are publicly available through the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory.