Controlling weak-lensing shear biases from undetected galaxies in the era of Stage IV surveys

ABSTRACT Gravitational lensing of background galaxies by intervening matter is a powerful probe of the cosmological model. In the era of Stage IV surveys, contamination from galaxies below the detection threshold has emerged as a significant source of bias. Adopting a noise-bias-free machine-learning method to estimate shear, we quantify the impact of faint galaxies for a Euclid-like survey. In our baseline simulations, faint blends induce a multiplicative shear bias of −0.008, well above Euclid’s requirement. Similar to previous studies, we find that calibration simulations must include neighbouring galaxies to AB apparent magnitudes as faint as 27.0 (+2.1, −0.9) and within approximately 1.0 (+0.2, −0.2) arcsec of each bright sample galaxy (BSG; the galaxy for which shear is measured). By varying faint galaxy properties, we identify which ones significantly affect shear biases and quantify how well they must be constrained. Crucially, we find that biases not only depend on the mean projected faint-galaxy density and apparent-magnitude distribution across the sample, but also on how these quantities vary with the observed brightness of the BSG. Furthermore, biases are sensitive to radial and tangential alignments and positional anisotropy of faint galaxies relative to BSGs. By contrast, shear coherence between BSGs and faint galaxies, parallel orientation alignments, and variations in the faint galaxy size–magnitude relation have negligible impact within the parameter ranges explored. Our results guide calibration simulations and highlight the critical role of deep observations in measuring the properties of faint galaxies.