Minor Galaxy Interactions: Star Formation Rates and Galaxy Properties

By D. Woods, Margaret J. Geller. 2007

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study star formation in a sample of 1204 galaxies in minor ( ≥ 2) pair and compact groups, drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5. We analyze an analogous sample of 2409 galaxies in major ( < 2) pair and compact groups to ensure that our selection reproduces previous results, and we use a "field" sample of 65,570 galaxies for comparison. Our major and minor pair samples include only galaxies in spectroscopically confirmed pair, where the recessional velocity separation ΔV < 500 km s-1 and the projected spatial separation ΔD < 50 kpc h-1. The relative magnitude (a proxy for the mass ratio) of the pair is an important parameter in the effectiveness of the tidally triggered star formation in minor interactions. As expected, the secondary galaxies in minor pair show evidence for tidally triggered star formation, whereas the primary galaxies in the minor pair do not. The galaxy color is also an important parameter in the effectiveness of triggered star formation in the major galaxy pair. In the major pair sample, there is a correlation between the specific Hα star formation rate (SSFR) and ΔD in the blue primary and blue secondary galaxies; for the red primary and red secondary galaxies, there is none. Galaxies in pair have a higher mean SSFR at every absolute magnitude compared to matched sets of field galaxies, and the relative increase in mean SSFR becomes larger with decreasing intrinsic luminosity. We also detect a significantly increased AGN fraction in the pair galaxies compared to matched sets of field galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4761c8879121d5067d42c82ea56a76bb09510d97

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Citations in the corpus

Growth and activity of black holes in galaxy mergers with varying mass ratios (2014, background): “Ellison et al. (2011), however, find that in a sample of Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies with a close companion the AGN fraction strongly increases for the massive galaxies in the pairs, while the signal is marginal in the secondary galaxy (see also Woods & Geller 2007).”
Galaxy Zoo: the properties of merging galaxies in the nearby Universe – local environments, colours, masses, star formation rates and AGN activity (2009, result): “…evidence for increased AGN activity in mergers in broad agreement with several recent studies (Barton, Geller & Kenyon 2000; Alonso et al. 2007; Li et al. 2008) though contrary to early reports such as Kennicutt et al. (1987) and, more recently, Woods & Geller (2007), Schawinski et al. (2009b).”
HOW DO DISKS SURVIVE MERGERS? (2008, background): “…Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Maller et al. 2006; Fakhouri & Ma 2008; Stewart et al. 2007, and references therein) and observations (e.g. Lin et al. 2004; Barton et al. 2007; Woods et al. 2006; Woods & Geller 2007) it appears that “minor” mergers of mass ratios.”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – II. The effect of environment on interactions (2010, background): “…(unequalmass) pairs, the lower mass galaxy appears to be more affected by triggered star formation than the more massive counterpart (Donzelli & Pastoriza 1997; Woods & Geller 2007; Ellison et al. 2008; Liet al. 2008), as predicted by simulations (Bekki, Shioya & Whiting 2006; Cox et al. 2008).”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – V. Tracing changes in star formation rate and metallicity out to separations of 80 kpc (2012, methodology): “The SFRs and metallicities of our pairs are significantly offset from the control over significantly larger distance scales than has been previously seen (e.g., Lambas et al. 2003; Alonso et al. 2006; Woods & Geller 2007; Ellison et al. 2008b).”
A semi-analytic model for the co-evolution of galaxies, black holes and active galactic nuclei (2008, methodology): “…of star formation exhibited by ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGS), is well established (Sanders & Mirabel 1996; Barton, Geller & Kenyon 2000; Colina et al. 2001; Farrah et al. 2001; Woods, Geller & Barton 2006; Woods & Geller 2007; Barton et al. 2007; Li et al. 2007; Lin et al. 2007).”
GALAXY PAIRS IN THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY. I. STAR FORMATION, ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS FRACTION, AND THE LUMINOSITY/MASS–METALLICITY RELATION (2008, methodology): “Conversely, Woods & Geller (2007) find a higher AGN fraction in both minor and major pairs compared with field galaxies in a sample of 1200 galaxies with companions in the SDSS DR5.”
Interaction-induced star formation in a complete sample of 105 nearby star-forming galaxies (2007, background): “…such as the Centre for Astrophysics redshift survey (CfA2; Barton, Geller & Kenyon 2000; Woods, Geller & Barton 2006), the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS; Lambas et al. 2003) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; Nikolic, Cullen & Alexander 2004; Woods & Geller 2007; Ellison et al. 2008).”
Galaxy Zoo: the fraction of merging galaxies in the SDSS and their morphologies (2009, background): “…explain a variety of observations, notably localised bursts of star formation (Kennicutt et al. 1987; Schweizer et al. 2005; Di Matteo et al. 2005; Woods & Geller 2007; Barton et al. 2007; Li et al. 2008; Cox et al. 2008) and induced nuclear activity (Keel et al. 1985; Schawinski et al. 2007a;…”
The effect of galaxy mass ratio on merger-driven starbursts (2007, methodology): “…Geller 2007) find that minor mergers indeed lead to enhanced star formation, however the data also suggest that the enhancement is primarily observed in the satellite galaxy while the larger primary galaxy has star forming properties similar to non–interacting field galaxies (Woods & Geller 2007).”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – VIII. The observational properties of post-merger galaxies (2013, background): “C O ] 1 6 A ration), infra-red emission (Hwang et al. 2010, 2011; Ellison et al. 2013) and nuclear activity (Alonso et al. 2007; Woods & Geller 2007; Li et al. 2008b; Ellison et al. 2008, 2011; Rogers et al. 2009; Darg et al. 2010; Liu, Shen & Strauss 2012; Sabater et al. 2013).”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – IX. Merger-induced AGN activity as traced by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (2014, background): “Although AGN excesses in samples of galaxy pairs have been found at optical,radio and X-ray wavelengths (e.g., Woods & Geller 2007; Koss et al. 2010; Silverman et al. 2011; Koss et al. 2012; Liu et al. 2012; Sabater et al. 2013), a direct comparison of these selectiontechniques has not been…”