pop-cosmos: Redshifts and physical properties of KiDS-1000 galaxies

TL;DR

This paper applies a Bayesian generative model to perform spectral energy distribution fitting for 4 million galaxies in the KiDS-1000 survey, providing detailed physical property estimates and validating the approach for cosmological studies.

Contribution

It introduces pop-cosmos, a scalable Bayesian SED fitting method calibrated on deep data, enabling joint inference of galaxy redshifts and physical properties for large surveys.

Findings

Achieved low bias and outlier rates in photometric redshift estimation.

Identified galaxy contaminants and trends in physical properties across redshifts.

Validated the method's effectiveness for cosmological and galaxy evolution analyses.

Abstract

Principled Bayesian inference of galaxy properties has not previously been performed for wide-area weak lensing surveys with millions of sources. We address this gap by applying the pop-cosmos generative model to perform spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting for 4 million KiDS-1000 galaxies. Calibrated on deep COSMOS2020 photometric data, pop-cosmos specifies a physically-motivated prior over the galaxy population up to $z \simeq 6$ in stellar population synthesis (SPS) parameter space. Using the Speculator SPS emulator with GPU-accelerated MCMC sampling, we perform full posterior inference at 6.5 GPU seconds per galaxy, obtaining joint constraints on galaxy redshifts and physical properties. We validate photometric redshifts against $\sim\!185,\!000$ KiDS galaxies cross-matched to DESI DR1 spectroscopic samples, achieving low bias ($3\times10^{-3}$), scatter ($\sigma_{\mathrm{MAD}}=0.04$), and outlier fraction (3.7%) for the Bright Galaxy Survey, with comparable performance (bias $3\times10^{-2}$, $\sigma_{\mathrm{MAD}}=0.05$, 1.3% outliers) for luminous red galaxies (LRGs). Within the LRG sample, we identify massive, dusty, star-forming contaminants at $z \simeq 0.4$ satisfying standard colour selections for quenched populations. We infer trends in stellar mass, star formation, metallicity, and dust across five tomographic redshift bins consistent with established scaling relations. Using specific star formation rate constraints, we identify $\sim$10% of KiDS-1000 galaxies as quenched, versus 37% implied by conservative colour cuts. This enables the construction of weak lensing samples defined by physical properties while mitigating intrinsic alignment systematics and preserving statistical power. Our analysis validates pop-cosmos out-of-sample, establishing it as a scaleable approach for galaxy evolution and cosmological analyses in photometric surveys.