| 1 (2007) | |||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||
| We detect the weak gravitational lensing distortion of 450,000 background galaxies (20! R! 23) by 790 foreground galaxies (R! 18) selected from the Las Campanas Redshift Survey(LCRS). This is the first detection of weak lensing by field galaxies of known redshift, and as such permits us to reconstruct the shear profile of the typical field galaxy halo in absolute physical units (modulo H 0), and to investigate the dependence of halo mass upon galaxy luminosity. This is also the first galaxy-galaxy lensing study for which the calibration errors due to uncertainty in the background galaxy redshift distribution and the seeing correction are negligible. Within a projected radius of 200 h \Gamma1 kpc, the shear profile is consistent with an isothermal profile with circular velocity v c = 164 \Sigma 20 km s \Gamma1 for an L galaxy, consistent with the typical circular velocity for the disks of spirals at this luminosity. This halo mass normalization, combined with the halo profile derived by Fischer et al. (2000) from a galaxy-galaxy lensing analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, places a lower limit of (2:7 \Sigma 0:6) \Theta 10 | |||||||||||||
Publication details | |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||