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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2005
We present our cosmic shear analysis of the Galaxy Evolution from Morphology and SEDs (GEMS) survey. Imaged with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on HST, GEMS provides high resolution imaging spanning some 800 square arcmins in the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS). We discuss the benefits of using space-based data for weak lensing studies and show that the ACS is a very powerful instrument in this regard. We find that we are not limited by systematic errors arising from the anisotropic ACS point spread function distortion and use our cosmic shear results to place joint constraints on the matter density parameter $\Omega_m$ and the amplitude of the matter power spectrum $\sigma_8$, finding $\sigma_8(\Omega_m/0.3)^{0.62}=0.73 \pm 0.12$.
To investigate the impact of atmospheric seeing on weak lensing analysis we compare the shear measured from CDFS galaxies resolved by the COMBO-17 survey and imaged by GEMS. We find good agreement between the two surveys and a higher dispersion in the intrinsic ellipticity distribution of COMBO-17. This dispersion implies that a space-based cosmic shear analysis would yield higher signal-to-noise results compared to a ground-based cosmic shear analysis of the same galaxy sample.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html