Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Synthetic-source Injection Across the Full Survey Using Balrog

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive synthetic-source injection catalog for the Dark Energy Survey Year 6, demonstrating its effectiveness in characterizing survey performance and supporting cosmological analyses.

Contribution

It introduces the largest high-fidelity SSI catalog for DES Y6, validating the pipeline's accuracy and consistency with data, and discusses its applications in cosmology.

Findings

DES Y6 pipeline provides percent-level accuracy in object properties

SSI catalog shows strong consistency with data catalogs

Applications include testing survey systematics and cosmological measurements

Abstract

Synthetic source injection (SSI), the insertion of sources into pixel-level on-sky images, is a powerful method for characterizing object detection and measurement in wide-field, astronomical imaging surveys. Within the Dark Energy Survey (DES), SSI plays a critical role in characterizing all necessary algorithms used in converting images to catalogs, and in deriving quantities needed for the cosmology analysis, such as object detection rates, galaxy redshift estimation, galaxy magnification, star-galaxy classification, and photometric performance. We present here a source injection catalog of $146$ million injections spanning the entire 5000 deg$^2$ DES footprint, generated using the Balrog SSI pipeline. Through this sample, we demonstrate that the DES Year 6 (Y6) image processing pipeline provides accurate estimates of the object properties, for both galaxies and stars, at the percent-level, and we highlight specific regimes where the accuracy is reduced. We then show the consistency between SSI and data catalogs, for all galaxy samples developed within the weak lensing and galaxy clustering analyses of DES Y6. The consistency between the two catalogs also extends to their correlations with survey observing properties (seeing, airmass, depth, extinction, etc.). Finally, we highlight a number of applications of this catalog to the DES Y6 cosmology analysis. This dataset is the largest SSI catalog produced at this fidelity and will serve as a key testing ground for exploring the utility of SSI catalogs in upcoming surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time.