The PAU Survey: galaxy stellar population properties estimates with narrowband data

TL;DR

This study assesses whether narrowband photometry improves the estimation of galaxy stellar population properties, finding limited enhancement but some increased diversity in metallicity and dust measurements, using data from the COSMOS field.

Contribution

It evaluates the impact of narrowband data on galaxy property estimates and compares two spectral energy distribution fitting codes, CIGALE and Prospector.

Findings

Limited improvement in property constraints with narrowband data.

Increased diversity in metallicity and dust optical depth estimates.

Good agreement with COSMOS2020 catalogue measurements.

Abstract

Narrowband galaxy surveys have recently gained interest as a promising method to achieve the necessary accuracy on the photometric redshift estimate of individual galaxies for stage-IV cosmological surveys. One key advantage is the ability to provide higher spectral resolution information about galaxies that should allow a more accurate and precise estimation of galaxy stellar population properties. However, the impact of adding narrow-band photometry on the stellar population properties estimate is largely unexplored. The scope of this work is two-fold: on one side, leveraging the predictive power of broad-band and narrow-band data to infer galaxy physical properties such as stellar masses, ages, star formation rates and metallicities. On the other hand, evaluating the improvement of performance in estimating galaxy properties when we use narrow-band data instead of broad-band. In this work we measure the stellar population properties of a sample of galaxies in the COSMOS field for which both narrowband and broadband data are available. In particular, we employ narrowband data from PAUS and broad-band data from CFHTLS. We use two different spectral energy distribution fitting codes to measure galaxy properties, namely CIGALE and Prospector. We find that the increased spectral resolution of narrow-band photometry does not yield a substantial improvement on constraining galaxy properties using spectral energy distribution fitting. Still we find that we obtain a more diverse distribution of metallicities and dust optical depths with cigale when employing the narrowband data. The effect is not as prominent as expected, which we relate this to the low narrowband SNR of a majority of the galaxies, the respective drawbacks of both codes as well as the coverage only in the optical regime. The measured properties are afterwards compared to the COSMOS2020 catalogue, showing good agreement.