pop-cosmos: Galaxy size evolution across structural and star-formation classifications in COSMOS-Web
Madalina N. Tudorache, Hiranya V. Peiris, Stephen Thorp, Sinan Deger, Daniel J. Mortlock, Gurjeet Jagwani, Anik Halder, Boris Leistedt, Benedict Van den Bussche, Joel Leja
astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.CO
Submitted: 2026-06-26
Comments: 22 pages, 10 figures, to be submitted to MNRAS
Code: https://github.com/justinalsing/affine
Project page: https://cosmos2025.iap.fr/catalog.html
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Galaxy sizes are correlated with stellar mass and redshift, as characterised by size scaling relations.
Terminology
Abstract
Galaxy sizes are correlated with stellar mass and redshift, as characterised by size scaling relations. The inferred forms of these scaling relations are sensitive to how galaxies are classified -- either by their star formation activity (e.g. specific star-formation rate, sSFR) or by their morphology markers (e.g. bulge-to-total ratio, S' e rsic index). We combine stellar mass and sSFR estimates from pop-cosmos (a generative model trained on COSMOS2020 Spitzer IRAC Ch.1 <26) with size and morphology measurements from COSMOS-Web, obtaining 99,369 galaxies. By investigating the size-mass and the size-redshift relations, we show that: (i) the sSFR/morphology splits give quantitatively different slopes, intercepts, and intrinsic scatter behaviour; (ii) intrinsic scatter depends on structural morphology but not on sSFR, which constrains the galaxy-halo connection; (iii) the quiescent and bulge-dominated size-mass relations both show double-power law breaks, but at different pivot masses, indicating that quenching and structural transformation occur on different time-scales; (iv) the morphology-dependent trends are only recoverable from space-based imaging. Further, the quiescent pivot mass M about 10 10.7 M coincides with the mass scale at which AGN (infrared torus) bolometric luminosity fraction peaks in transitioning galaxies, while the bulge-dominated pivot mass M about 10 11.1 M coincides with the halo mass at which AGN-driven baryonic redistribution peaks, tracing the interval over which AGN feedback ramps from quenching onset to structural transformation.
Sources
- JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) Data Release 5: Catalogs of inferred morphological properties of galaxies from JWST/NIRCam imaging in GOODS-N and GOODS-S
- Euclid Quick Data Release (Q1). Quenching precedes bulge formation in dense environments but follows it in the field
- Euclid: Disky titans - surprisingly high star formation activity and gas content in two brightest group galaxies at z 0.75
- pop-cosmos: Redshifts and physical properties of KiDS-1000 galaxies
- The Spectral Energy Distributions of Galaxies
- Everything Every Band All at Once II: The Relationship Between Optical Size and Stellar Mass Over Eight Billion Years of Cosmic History
- AION-1: Omnimodal Foundation Model for Astronomical Sciences
- PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library
- Thermostats, Not Engines: A New Picture of Halo Gas Regulation
- The limits of feedback from active galactic nuclei
- Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations
- COSMOS-Web: A Multi-wavelength Morphological Catalog of ~780,000 Galaxies
- COSMOS-Web: Galaxy Size and Surface Brightness Evolution at Rest-Frame 1.22 $\mu$m Since $z=3$
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