Automated galaxy sizes in Euclid images using the Segment Anything Model

¹ Departamento de Física Teórica, Atómica y Óptica, Universidad de Valladolid, 47011 Valladolid, Spain
² Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA), Plaza de San Juan, 1, 44001 Teruel, Spain
³ Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Universidade de Lisboa, OAL, Tapada da Ajuda, PT1349-018 Lisbon, Portugal
⁴ GIR GCME. Departamento de Informática, Universidad de Valladolid, 47011 Valladolid, Spain
⁵ Instituto de Física de Cantabria (CSIC-UC), Avda. Los Castros s/n, 39005 Santander, Spain

^★ Corresponding author; astrovega@gmail.com

Received: 4 October 2024
Accepted: 2 December 2024

Abstract

Context. Stellar disk truncations, also referred to as galaxy edges, are key indicators of galactic size, determined by the radial location of the gas density threshold for star formation. This threshold essentially marks the boundary of the luminous matter in a galaxy. Accurately measuring galaxy sizes for millions of galaxies is essential for understanding the physical processes driving galaxy evolution over cosmic time.

Aims. We aim to explore the potential of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a foundation model designed for image segmentation, to automatically identify disk truncations in galaxy images. With the Euclid Wide Survey poised to deliver vast datasets, our goal is to assess SAM’s capability to measure galaxy sizes in a fully automated manner.

Methods. SAM was applied to a labeled dataset of 1,047 disk-like galaxies with M_* > 1010 M_⊙ at redshifts up to z ~ 1, sourced from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) CANDELS fields. We “euclidized” the HST galaxy images by creating composite RGB images, using the F160W (H-band), F125W (J-band), and F814W + F606W (I-band + V -band) HST filters, respectively. Using these processed images as input for SAM, we retrieved various truncation masks for each galaxy image under different configurations of the input data.

Results. We find excellent agreement between the galaxy sizes identified by SAM and those measured manually (i.e., by using the radial positions of the stellar disk edges in galaxy light profiles), with an average deviation of approximately 3%. This error reduces to about 1% when excluding problematic cases.

Conclusions. Our results highlight the strong potential of SAM for detecting disk truncations and measuring galaxy sizes across large datasets in an automated way. SAM performs well without requiring extensive image preprocessing, labeled training datasets for truncations (used only for validation), fine-tuning, or additional domain-specific adaptations such as transfer learning.