Analytical covariances for catalogue-based pseudo- C s
Kevin Wolz, Elyas Farah, Robert Reischke, David Alonso, Andrina Nicola
astro-ph.CO
Submitted: 2026-07-16
Comments: 29 pages, 9 figures
Code: https://github.com/LSSTDESC/NaMaster
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Multiple cosmological observables, such as the galaxy overdensity or cosmic shear, consist of fields sampled at the discrete positions of astrophysical sources.
Terminology
Abstract
Multiple cosmological observables, such as the galaxy overdensity or cosmic shear, consist of fields sampled at the discrete positions of astrophysical sources. Recent work has presented methods to estimate the angular power spectra of such fields, avoiding the construction of pixelated sky maps and the finite-resolution effects associated with them. In this work, we present a method to estimate the disconnected (also known as "Gaussian") covariance of these angular power spectra, addressing subtle effects such as the effective area overlap between different catalogue-based fields and the additional Poisson-like variance arising from the discrete nature of the catalogues. The method relies on the so-called Narrow-Kernel Approximation to account for the contribution of distinct source pairs to the estimator, while including the noise-like contributions from self-pairs exactly. We explicitly compare this approach with a brute-force method that can produce the exact covariance for sparse samples, and validate it against simulations. We show that the method is accurate in realistic scenarios, spanning both dense and noise-dominated datasets (e.g., cosmic shear) and sparse, noise-dominated observables (e.g., fast radio bursts). The method is implemented in the public code NaMaster.
Sources
- Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters
- The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Power Spectra, Likelihoods and $\Lambda$CDM Parameters
- Tomographic galaxy clustering with the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam first year public data release
- DESI luminous red galaxy samples for cross-correlations
- Weak Gravitational Lensing of the CMB
- The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the DR6 CMB Lensing Power Spectrum and its Implications for Structure Growth
- Weak Gravitational Lensing
- Weak Gravitational Lensing
- The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect
- Astrophysics with the Spatially and Spectrally Resolved Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effects: A Millimetre/Submillimetre Probe of the Warm and Hot Universe
- Evidence for large baryonic feedback at low and intermediate redshifts from kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich observations with ACT and DESI photometric galaxies
- kSZ for everyone: the pseudo-Cl approach to stacking
- The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Large-scale velocity reconstruction with the kinematic Sunyaev--Zel'dovich effect and DESI LRGs
- Detection of cosmological dipoles aligned with transverse peculiar velocities
- Dipoles for everyone: the pseudo-$C_\ell$ approach to directional stacking
- Measurement of the Dispersion$\unicode{x2013}$Galaxy Cross-Power Spectrum with the Second CHIME/FRB Catalog
- Probing baryonic feedback and cosmology with 3$\times$2-point statistic of FRBs and galaxies
- Probing baryonic feedback with fast radio bursts: joint analyses with cosmic shear and galaxy clustering
- Backlighting the Cosmic Web with Fast Radio Bursts: An Anthology of Dispersion Measure Cross-Correlations with Large-Scale Structure and Baryon Tracers
- The growth of density perturbations in the last $\sim$10 billion years from tomographic large-scale structure data
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