Preparing for low-surface-brightness science with the Rubin Observatory: characterisation of LSB tidal features from mock images

Minor mergers leave behind long lived, but extremely faint and extended tidal features including tails, streams, loops and plumes. These act as a fossil record for the host galaxy's past interactions, allowing us to infer recent accretion histories and place constraints on the properties and nature of a galaxy's dark matter halo. However, shallow imaging or small homogeneous samples of past surveys have resulted in weak observational constraints on the role of galaxy mergers and interactions in galaxy assembly. The Rubin Observatory, which is optimised to deliver fast, wide field-of-view imaging, will enable deep and unbiased observations over the 18,000 square degrees of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), resulting in samples of potentially of millions of objects undergoing tidal interactions. Using realistic mock images produced with state-of-the-art cosmological simulations we perform a comprehensive theoretical investigation of the extended diffuse light around galaxies and galaxy groups down to low stellar mass densities. We consider the nature, frequency and visibility of tidal features and debris across a range of environments and stellar masses as well as their reliability as an indicator of galaxy accretion histories. We consider how observational biases such as projection effects, the point-spread-function and survey depth may effect the proper characterisation and measurement of tidal features, finding that LSST will be capable of recovering much of the flux found in the outskirts of L* galaxies at redshifts beyond local volume. In our simulated sample, tidal features are ubiquitous In L* galaxies and remain common even at significantly lower masses (M*>10^10 Msun). The fraction of stellar mass found in tidal features increases towards higher masses, rising to 5-10% for the most massive objects in our sample (M*~10^11.5 Msun). Such objects frequently exhibit many distinct tidal features often with complex morphologies, becoming increasingly numerous with increased depth. The interpretation and characterisation of such features can vary significantly with orientation and imaging depth. Our findings demonstrate the importance of accounting for the biases that arise from projection effects and surface-brightness limits and suggest that, even after the LSST is complete, much of the discovery space in low surface-brightness Universe will remain to be explored.