statmorph-lsst: Quantifying and correcting morphological biases in galaxy surveys
Abstract
Quantitative morphology provides a key probe of galaxy evolution across cosmic time and environments. However, these metrics can be biased by changes in imaging quality - resolution and depth - either across the survey area or the sample. To prepare for the upcoming Rubin LSST data, we investigate this bias for all metrics measured by statmorph and single-component S\'ersic fitting with Galfit. We find that geometrical measurements (ellipticity, axis ratio, Petrosian radius, and effective radius) are robust within 10% at most depths and resolutions. Light concentration measurements (, Gini, ) systematically decrease with resolution, leading low-mass or high-redshift bulge-dominated sources to appear indistinguishable from disks. S\'ersic index , while unbiased, suffers from a 20-40% uncertainty due to degeneracies in the S\'ersic fit. Disturbance measurements (, , ) depend on signal-to-noise and are thus affected by noise and surface-brightness dimming. We quantify this dependence for each parameter, offer empirical correction functions, and show that the evolution in observed in JWST galaxies can be explained purely by observational biases. We propose two new measurements - isophotal asymmetry and substructure - that aim to resolve some of these biases. Finally, we provide a Python package statmorph-lsst implementing these changes and a full dataset that enables tests of custom functions (see text for links).
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.09644,
title = {statmorph-lsst: Quantifying and correcting morphological biases in galaxy surveys},
author = {Elizaveta Sazonova and Cameron R. Morgan and Michael Balogh and Matías Blaña and Carlos G. Bornancini and Aidan P. Cotter and Darko Donevski and Alister W. Graham and Hector M. Hernandez Toledo and Benne W. Holwerda and Jeyhan S. Kartaltepe and Garreth Martin and William J. Pearson and Rossella Ragusa and Vicente Rodriguez-Gomez and Michael J. Rutkowski and Jose Antonio Vázquez-Mata and Rogier A. Windhorst and Jacob Yuzovitskiy},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.09644},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
32 pages, 16 figures + appendices; accepted to the Open Journal for Astrophysics. Data available at 10.5281/zenodo.17585608. Package url: github.com/astro-nova/statmorph-lsst