The three-year shear catalog of the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam SSP Survey

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive galaxy shear catalog from the Hyper Suprime-Cam SSP Survey, calibrated for weak lensing analysis, with detailed assessments of systematic errors and their implications for cosmological studies.

Contribution

The paper introduces a three-year shear catalog with calibrated galaxy shapes and systematic error analysis, advancing weak lensing data quality for cosmology.

Findings

Galaxy shear catalog covers 433.48 deg$^2$ with high galaxy density.

Calibration achieves shear bias below 0.009, independent of redshift.

Systematic effects like PSF residuals and star-galaxy correlations identified.

Abstract

We present the galaxy shear catalog that will be used for the three-year cosmological weak gravitational lensing analyses using data from the Wide layer of the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Subaru Strategic Program (SSP) Survey. The galaxy shapes are measured from the $i$-band imaging data acquired from 2014 to 2019 and calibrated with image simulations that resemble the observing conditions of the survey based on training galaxy images from the Hubble Space Telescope in the COSMOS region. The catalog covers an area of 433.48 deg$^2$ of the northern sky, split into six fields. The mean $i$-band seeing is 0.59 arcsec. With conservative galaxy selection criteria (e.g., $i$-band magnitude brighter than 24.5), the observed raw galaxy number density is 22.9 arcmin$^{-2}$, and the effective galaxy number density is 19.9 arcmin$^{-2}$. The calibration removes the galaxy property-dependent shear estimation bias to a level: $|\delta m|<9\times 10^{-3}$. The bias residual $\delta m$ shows no dependence on redshift in the range $0<z\leq 3$. We define the requirements for cosmological weak lensing science for this shear catalog, and quantify potential systematics in the catalog using a series of internal null tests for systematics related to point-spread function modelling and shear estimation. A variety of the null tests are statistically consistent with zero or within requirements, but (i) there is evidence for PSF model shape residual correlations; and (ii) star-galaxy shape correlations reveal additive systematics. Both effects become significant on $>1$ degree scales and will require mitigation during the inference of cosmological parameters using cosmic shear measurements.