Euclid preparation. Calibrated intrinsic galaxy alignments in the Euclid Flagship simulation

TL;DR

This paper develops a semi-analytic model of galaxy intrinsic alignments in the Euclid Flagship simulation to predict their impact on weak lensing measurements, calibrated against multiple observational datasets.

Contribution

It introduces a new calibrated model of galaxy alignments with 12 parameters, improving predictions of intrinsic alignment effects on Euclid's weak lensing data.

Findings

Model reproduces observed ellipticity statistics within uncertainties.

Intrinsic alignments can modify Euclid's lensing signals by up to 10%.

Calibration data volume limits precise prior constraints.

Abstract

Intrinsic alignments of galaxies are potentially a major contaminant of cosmological analyses of weak gravitational lensing. We construct a semi-analytic model of galaxy ellipticities and alignments in the \Euclid Flagship simulation to predict this contamination in Euclid's weak lensing observations. Galaxy shapes and orientations are determined by the corresponding properties of the host haloes in the underlying $N$-body simulation, as well as the relative positions of galaxies within their halo. Alignment strengths are moderated via stochastic misalignments, separately for central and satellite galaxies and conditional on the galaxy's redshift, luminosity, and rest-frame colour. The resulting model is calibrated against galaxy ellipticity statistics from the COSMOS Survey, selected alignment measurements based on Sloan Digital Sky Survey samples, and galaxy orientations extracted from the Horizon-AGN hydrodynamic simulation at redshift $z=1$. The best-fit model has a total of 12 alignment parameters and generally reproduces the calibration data sets well within the $1\sigma$ statistical uncertainties of the observations and the \flagship simulation, with notable exceptions for the most luminous sub-samples on small physical scales. The statistical power of the calibration data and the volume of the single \flagship realisation are still too small to provide informative prior ranges for intrinsic alignment amplitudes in relevant galaxy samples. As a first application, we predict that \Euclid end-of-mission tomographic weak gravitational lensing two-point statistics are modified by up to order $10\,\%$ due to intrinsic alignments.