A distortion of very-high-redshift galaxy number counts by gravitational lensing

J. Stuart B. Wyithe (), Haojing Yan, Rogier A. Windhorst and Shude Mao
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J. Stuart B. Wyithe: School of Physics, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia
Haojing Yan: Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics, The Ohio State University
Rogier A. Windhorst: School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University
Shude Mao: Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK

Nature, 2011, vol. 469, issue 7329, 181-184

Abstract: Gravitational lensing distorts post-dark age Universe A measure of the star-forming activity that took place during the epoch of reionization — when the Universe was emerging from a dark age and neutral hydrogen was being reionized — can be obtained from the number counts of high-redshift galaxy candidates at redshifts z >∼7. Gravitational lensing by galaxies between these distant objects and us can complicate matters, however. A new theoretical modelling study suggests that gravitational lensing is likely to dominate the observed properties of galaxies with redshifts of z >∼12, where the instrumental limiting magnitude is expected to be brighter than the characteristic magnitude of the galaxy sample. This factor could alter number counts by an order of magnitude. Future surveys will therefore need to account for a significant gravitational lensing bias in high-redshift galaxy samples.

Date: 2011
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DOI: 10.1038/nature09619

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