Papers › A forward-modelling approach to overcome PSF smearing and fit flexible models to the...
A forward-modelling approach to overcome PSF smearing and fit flexible models to the chemical structure of galaxies
Benjamin Metha, Simon Birrer, Tommaso Treu, Michele Trenti, Xuheng Ding, Xin Wang
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Historically, metallicity profiles of galaxies have been modelled using a radially symmetric, two-parameter linear model, which reveals that most galaxies are more metal-rich in their central regions than their outskirts. However, this model is known to yield inaccurate results when the point-spread function (PSF) of a telescope is large. Furthermore, a radially symmetric model cannot capture asymmetric structures within a galaxy. In this work, we present an extension of the popular forward-modelling python package LENSTRONOMY, which allows the user to overcome both of these obstacles. We demonstrate the new features of this code base through two illustrative examples on simulated data. First, we show that through forward modelling, LENSTRONOMY is able to recover accurately the metallicity gradients of galaxies, even when the PSF is comparable to the size of a galaxy, as long as the data is observed with a sufficient number of pixels. Additionally, we demonstrate how LENSTRONOMY is able to fit irregular metallicity profiles to galaxies that are not well-described by a simple surface brightness profile. This opens up pathways for detailed investigations into the connections between morphology and chemical structure for galaxies at cosmological distances using the transformative capabilities of JWST. Our code is publicly available and open source, and can also be used to model spatial distributions of other galaxy properties that are traced by its surface brightness profile.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections