A Value-added Physical Properties Catalog for Low-redshift Galaxies from DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys DR10

TL;DR

This paper presents a deep learning-based catalog estimating star formation rate, stellar mass, and metallicity for over 500 million low-redshift galaxies from DESI imaging surveys, enabling large-scale population studies.

Contribution

Introduces a multimodal deep learning model combining imaging and catalog data to efficiently estimate galaxy properties for large photometric datasets.

Findings

Generated a catalog for ~547 million galaxies with property estimates.

Validated the model against independent measurements and scaling relations.

Provided the first homogeneous photometry-based property catalog for DESI LS DR10.

Abstract

Galaxy physical properties-such as star formation rate (SFR), stellar mass, and gas-phase metallicity-are essential for population studies and evolutionary analyses. Deriving these quantities for billions of galaxies in modern imaging surveys presents significant challenges due to limited spectroscopy and the computational costs associated with traditional spectral energy distribution fitting. As a result, many galaxies in large photometric surveys still lack homogeneous property estimates. This study introduces a multimodal deep learning model that integrates optical imaging with photometric catalog features to estimate SFR, stellar mass, and oxygen abundance in low-redshift galaxies. The model incorporates a ResNet-based convolutional neural network to extract spatial information from multiband images and a multilayer perceptron that processes catalog-level photometric features, leveraging complementary constraints from morphology, surface brightness, and broadband colors. Trained on reference measurements from the MPA-JHU DR8 catalog, the model is optimized for efficient large-scale estimation. When applied to the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys (LS) DR10, the model generates a value-added catalog containing physical property estimates for approximately 547 million galaxies with redshifts z <= 0.5. Validation through comparisons with independent catalogs and exploration of key scaling relations demonstrates that while the derived properties are not intended for precision measurements of individual objects, they effectively capture the dominant astrophysical trends necessary for ensemble studies. This catalog represents the first homogeneous set of photometry-based SFR, stellar mass, and metallicity estimates for DESI LS DR10, providing a vital resource for statistical studies of galaxies in the local Universe and facilitating comparisons with current and future spectroscopic surveys.