On the frequency, intensity, and duration of starburst episodes triggered by galaxy interactions and mergers

By Paola Di Matteo, Frédéric Bournaud, M. Martig, F. Combes, A. Melchior, B. Semelin. 2008

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We investigate the intensity enhancement and the duration of starburst episodes triggered by major galaxy interactions and mergers. We analyze two large statistical datasets of numerical simulations. These have been obtained using two independent and different numerical techniques to model baryonic and dark matter evolution that are extensively compared for the first time. One is a Tree-SPH code, the other one is a grid-based N-body sticky-particles code. We show that, at low redshift, galaxy interactions and mergers in general trigger only moderate star formation enhancements. Strong starbursts where the star formation rate is increased by a factor greater than 5 are rare and found only in about 15% of major galaxy interactions and mergers. Merger-driven starbursts are also rather short-lived, with a typical duration of activity of a few 10 8 yr. These conclusions are found to be robust, independent of the numerical techniques and star formation models. At higher redshifts where galaxies contain more gas, gas inflow-induced starbursts are neither stronger nor longer than their local counterparts. In turn, the formation of massive gas clumps, results of local Jeans instability that can occur spontaneously in gas-rich disks or be indirectly favored by galaxy interactions, could play a more important role in determining the duration and intensity of star formation episodes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0cbb67b7d960b7aef5f3c13a3f2d50952d692946

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Citations in the corpus

Growth and activity of black holes in galaxy mergers with varying mass ratios (2014, background): “…different global orbital parameters (e.g. more or less radial orbits) might be very important (as hinted by, e.g., Callegari et al. 2011; see also Di Matteo et al. 2008), but we chose to focus on more ‘internal’ galactic parameters, such as galactic mass, gas fraction, and internal disc rotation.”
THE LESSER ROLE OF STARBURSTS IN STAR FORMATION AT z = 2 (2011, background): “…galaxies that are still on the MS can be witnessing merging events, given that not all mergers are expected to produce strong SFR enhancements (di Matteo et al. 2008), hence our off-sequence galaxies can be seen as objects where a major merger event has substantially boosted the SSFR, increasing…”
VERY HIGH GAS FRACTIONS AND EXTENDED GAS RESERVOIRS IN z = 1.5 DISK GALAXIES (2009, background): “This is much longer than the typical duration expected for starbursts (<∼ 100 Myr) triggered by mergers, based on simulations (e.g., Mihos & Hernquist 1996; Di Matteo et al. 2008) and also on the observed gas consumption timescales for IR luminous merging galaxies (e.g., Downes & Solomon 1998).”
THE DRIVING MECHANISM OF STARBURSTS IN GALAXY MERGERS (2010, background): “…bursts of star formation (SF) are produced by major mergers of equal-mass galaxies (Barnes & Hernquist 1991; Mihos & Hernquist 1996; Cox et al. 2006), while the SF activity rapidly decreases with increasing mass ratio (Cox et al. 2008; Di Matteo et al. 2008; Manthey et al. 2008; Knierman 2009).”
The effect of gas fraction on the morphology and time-scales of disc galaxy mergers (2009, background): “…et al. 2007) or funnel gas into the galaxies’ centers to spark strong central starbursts (e.g. Mihos & Hernquist 1996; Martig & Bournaud 2008; di Matteo et al. 2008) and feed active galactic nuclei (e.g. Di Matteo, Springel, & Hernquist 2005; Hopkins et al. 2005, 2008; Johansson et al. 2009;…”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – IX. Merger-induced AGN activity as traced by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (2014, background): “2006; Woods et al. 2006; Woods & Geller 2007; Di Matteo et al. 2007, 2008; Ellison et al. 2008; Cox et al. 2008; Smith & Struck 2010; Patton et al. 2011; Liu et al. 2012; Scudder et al. 2012; Patton et al. 2013), and the formation of spheroids (e.g., Toomre 1977; Lake & Dressler 1986; Shier &…”
THE HIDDEN “AGN MAIN SEQUENCE”: EVIDENCE FOR A UNIVERSAL BLACK HOLE ACCRETION TO STAR FORMATION RATE RATIO SINCE z ∼ 2 PRODUCING AN MBH–M* RELATION (2012, background): “Morphological and dynamical studies do find evidence of mergers among these galaxies (e.g., Elmegreen et al. 2007; Förster Schreiber et al. 2009), but being on the MS (Kartaltepe et al. 2011) implies their star-formation is not strongly enhanced by these interactions (Di Matteo et al. 2008).”
THE BULK OF THE BLACK HOLE GROWTH SINCE z ∼ 1 OCCURS IN A SECULAR UNIVERSE: NO MAJOR MERGER–AGN CONNECTION (2010, background): “…always, as seen in models (Di Matteo et al. 2007) and observations (Bergvall et al. 2003), and (3) its overall contribution is relatively modest (Di Matteo et al. 2008; Jogee et al. 2009), with no more than 10% of star formation in massive galaxies being triggered by major mergers at z ∼ 0.6…”
Evolution of the dust emission of massive galaxies up to z=4 and constraints on their dominant mode of star formation (2014, background): “The A113, page 11 of 17 depletion time in strong starbursts does not evolve with redshift and is compatible with 100 Myr, the typical timescale of the strong boost of star formation induced by major mergers (e.g., Di Matteo et al. 2008).”
Simulations of binary galaxy mergers and the link with fast rotators, slow rotators, and kinematically distinct cores (2011, background): “…studies have indeed shown that the resolution affects the properties of the simulated objects, either in cosmological simulations (Naab et al. 2007; Navarro et al. 2010) or on simulations of star formation in mergers (Cox et al. 2006b; Hopkins et al. 2008; Di Matteo et al. 2008; Wuyts et al. 2010).”
HYDRODYNAMICS OF HIGH-REDSHIFT GALAXY COLLISIONS: FROM GAS-RICH DISKS TO DISPERSION-DOMINATED MERGERS AND COMPACT SPHEROIDS (2010, result): “This factor is somewhat higher than the typical value in larger samples of merger simulations (e.g. Di Matteo et al. 2007, 2008; Martig & Bournaud 2008; Stewart et al. 2008) but not in large disagreement.”
GOODS-Herschel: the far-infrared view of star formation in active galactic nucleus host galaxies since z ≈ 3 (2011, background): “It is important to note that the starburst phase of a typical major merger is relatively short lived, with only around 1/3 of the life of the merger being spent in this regime (Di Matteo et al. 2008).”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – VIII. The observational properties of post-merger galaxies (2013, methodology): “The observational data therefore emphasize the conclusion made in the theoretical work of Di Matteo et al. (2008), that mergers do not always trigger starbursts.”
The star formation main sequence and stellar mass assembly of galaxies in the Illustris simulation (2014, background): “Also, the elevation depends sensitively on the mass ratio and orbital parameters of the merger (e.g. Di Matteo et al. 2007, 2008; Cox et al. 2008).”
MORPHOLOGICAL QUENCHING OF STAR FORMATION: MAKING EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES RED (2009, background): “…et al. 2009), (iii) energy feedback from an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), which could itself be triggered by galaxy mergers (Hopkins et al. 2005; Di Matteo et al. 2008; Cattaneo et al. 2005, 2006, 2009; Johansson et al. 2009a; Schawinski et al. 2009) (iv) and gravitational heating of a gas disk…”
DIFFERENT STAR FORMATION LAWS FOR DISKS VERSUS STARBURSTS AT LOW AND HIGH REDSHIFTS (2010, background): “Major mergers or other kinds of instabilities appear to be the most natural explanation for the increased efficienciesin the starbursts (although not all mergers will necessarily poduce this effect, di Matteo et al. 2008).”
REGULARITY UNDERLYING COMPLEXITY: A REDSHIFT-INDEPENDENT DESCRIPTION OF THE CONTINUOUS VARIATION OF GALAXY-SCALE MOLECULAR GAS PROPERTIES IN THE MASS-STAR FORMATION RATE PLANE (2013, unknown): “…(see Figure 7 in Hopkins et al. 2010) that, in qualitative terms, resemble the split into MS and SB activity we proposed in S12 and which seem broadly consistent with the expected modifications to the boost distributions of Di Matteo et al. (2008) discussed at the end of the last paragraph.”