English

Low surface brightness galaxies from BASS+MzLS with Machine Learning

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2024-05-01 v2

Abstract

From \sim 5000 deg2^{2} of the combination of the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS) and Mayall zz-band Legacy Survey (MzLS) which is also the northern sky region of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Surveys, we selected a sample of 31,825 candidates of low surface brightness galaxies (LSBGs) with the mean effective surface brightness 24.2 <μˉeff,g<< \bar{\mu}_{\rm eff,g} < 28.8 mag arcsec2^{\rm -2} and the half-light radius 2.5^{\prime\prime} <reff<< r_{\rm eff} < 20^{\prime\prime} based on the released photometric catalogue and the machine learning model. The distribution of the LSBGs is of bimodality in the gg - rr color, indicating the two distinct populations of the blue (gg - r<r < 0.60) and the red (gg - r>r > 0.60) LSBGs. The blue LSBGs appear spiral, disk or irregular while the red LSBGs are spheroidal or ellipitcal and spatially clustered. This trend shows that the color has a strong correlation with galaxy morphology for LSBGs. In the spatial distribution, the blue LSBGs are more uniformly distributed while the red ones are highly clustered, indicating that red LSBGs preferentially populated denser environment than the blue LSBGs. Besides, both populations have consistent distribution of ellipticity (median ϵ\epsilon\sim 0.3), half-light radius (median reffr_{\rm eff} \sim 4^{\prime\prime}), and Sersic index (median nn = 1), implying the dominance of the full sample by the round and disk galaxies. This sample has definitely extended the studies of LSBGs to a regime of lower surface brightness, fainter magnitude, and broader other properties than the previously SDSS-based samples.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.18408,
  title  = {Low surface brightness galaxies from BASS+MzLS with Machine Learning},
  author = {Peng-Liang Du and Wei Du and Bing-Qing Zhang and Zhen-Ping Yi and Min He and Hong Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.18408},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

20 pages, 11 figures, 1 table, accepted by Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:09:16.873Z