The effect of baryons in the cosmological lensing PDFs

TL;DR

This paper investigates how baryonic matter influences cosmological lensing statistics, revealing significant effects on magnification and multiple-image probabilities, crucial for interpreting upcoming observational data.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of baryonic effects on lensing PDFs using Magneticum simulations, highlighting their impact on magnification and multiple-image occurrences.

Findings

Baryonic matter increases magnified object probability by a factor of 2.

Baryonic effects enhance multiple-image occurrences by up to 500 times.

Results are robust across different source redshifts and resolutions.

Abstract

Observational cosmology is passing through a unique moment of grandeur with the amount of quality data growing fast. However, in order to better take advantage of this moment, data analysis tools have to keep up the pace. Understanding the effect of baryonic matter on the large-scale structure is one of the challenges to be faced in cosmology. In this work, we have thoroughly studied the effect of baryonic physics on different lensing statistics. Making use of the Magneticum Pathfinder suite of simulations we show that the influence of luminous matter on the 1-point lensing statistics of point sources is significant, enhancing the probability of magnified objects with $\mu>3$ by a factor of $2$ and the occurrence of multiple-images by a factor $5-500$ depending on the source redshift and size. We also discuss the dependence of the lensing statistics on the angular resolution of sources. Our results and methodology were carefully tested in order to guarantee that our uncertainties are much smaller than the effects here presented.