Paper ID: 2411.18440

Learning the Evolution of Physical Structure of Galaxies via Diffusion Models

Andrew Lizarraga, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Jacob Nowack, Yun Qi Li, Ying Nian Wu, Bernie Boscoe, Tuan Do

In astrophysics, understanding the evolution of galaxies in primarily through imaging data is fundamental to comprehending the formation of the Universe. This paper introduces a novel approach to conditioning Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) on redshifts for generating galaxy images. We explore whether this advanced generative model can accurately capture the physical characteristics of galaxies based solely on their images and redshift measurements. Our findings demonstrate that this model not only produces visually realistic galaxy images but also encodes the underlying changes in physical properties with redshift that are the result of galaxy evolution. This approach marks a significant advancement in using generative models to enhance our scientific insight into cosmic phenomena.

Submitted: Nov 27, 2024