The shape of dark matter haloes: results from weak lensing in the Ultraviolet Near-Infrared Optical Northern Survey (UNIONS)

TL;DR

This study measures the ellipticity of dark matter haloes around luminous red galaxies using weak lensing data from the UNIONS survey, finding that more massive haloes tend to be more elliptical, consistent with simulation predictions.

Contribution

It provides new observational measurements of dark matter halo ellipticity around LRGs using weak lensing from the UNIONS survey, extending previous work to higher mass ranges.

Findings

DR7 LRGs have halo ellipticity e=0.46±0.10

BOSS LRGs show marginal detection with e=0.20±0.10

Halo ellipticity increases with halo mass, consistent with simulations

Abstract

Cold dark matter haloes are expected to be triaxial, and so appear elliptical in projection. We use weak gravitational lensing from the Canada-France Imaging Survey (CFIS) component of the Ultraviolet-Near Infrared Optical Northern Survey (UNIONS) to measure the ellipticity of the dark matter haloes around Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (DR7) and from the CMASS and LOWZ samples of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), assuming their major axes are aligned with the stellar light. We find that DR7 LRGs with masses $M \sim 2.7\times10^{13} \mathrm{M}_{\odot}/h$ have halo ellipticities $e=0.46\pm0.10$. Expressed as a fraction of the galaxy ellipticity, we find $f_h = 2.2\pm0.6$. For BOSS LRGs, the detection is of marginal significance: $e = 0.20\pm0.10$ and $f_h=0.7\pm0.7$. These results are in agreement with other measurements of halo ellipticity from weak lensing and, taken together with previous results, suggest an increase of halo ellipticity of $0.10\pm0.06$ per decade in halo mass. This trend agrees with the predictions from hydrodynamical simulations, which find that at higher halo masses, not only do dark matter haloes become more elliptical, but that the misalignment between major axis of the stellar light in the central galaxy and that of the dark matter decreases.