Prospects for measuring the Doppler magnification dipole with LSST and DESI (2511.17858v1)

Abstract: We forecast the detectability of the Doppler magnification dipole with a joint analysis of galaxy spectroscopic redshifts and size measurements. The Doppler magnification arises from an apparent size variation caused by galaxies' peculiar velocities when mapping them from redshift space to real space. This phenomenon is the dominant contribution to the convergence at low redshifts ($\lesssim$ 0.5). A practical observational strategy is to cross-correlate a galaxy number count tracer, e.g. from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Bright Galaxy Survey, with the convergence field reconstructed from galaxy size measurements obtained by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). To assess the achievable precision of galaxy size measurements, we simulate LSST Y1-quality galaxy images with Galsim and measure them with the Galight profile fitting package. Our investigations, based on galaxy populations from LSST's synthetic galaxy catalogue cosmoDC2, show that the variance due to intrinsic galaxy size variation dominates over size measurement errors as expected, but may be lower than previous studies have suggested. Under our analysis assumptions, the Doppler magnification dipole would be detectable with a signal-to-noise ratio $\geq 10$ in multiple redshift bins between $0.1 \leq z \leq 0.5$ with DESI spectroscopic redshifts and LSST imaging.