The Merger Rate of Massive Galaxies

By Eric F. Bell, S. Phleps, R. Somerville, Christian Wolf, A. Borch, K. Meisenheimer. 2006

202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We calculate the projected two-point correlation function for samples of luminous and massive galaxies in the COMBO-17 photometric redshift survey, focusing particularly on the amplitude of the correlation function at small projected radii and exploring the constraints such measurements can place on the galaxy merger rate. For nearly volume-limited samples with 0.4 < z < 0.8, we find that 4% ± 1% of luminous MB < -20 galaxies are in close physical pairs (with real-space separation of <30 proper kpc). The corresponding fraction for massive galaxies with M* > 2.5 × 1010 M☉ is 5% ± 1%. Incorporating close pair fractions from the literature, the 2dFGRS and the SDSS, we find a fairly rapid evolution of the merger fraction of massive galaxies between z = 0.8 and the present day. Assuming that the major merger timescale is of order the dynamical timescale for close massive galaxy pairs, we tentatively infer that ~50% (70%) of all galaxies with present-day masses M* > 5 × 1010 M☉ (remnants of mergers between galaxies with M* > 2.5 × 1010 M☉) have undergone a major merger since z = 0.8(1): major mergers between massive galaxies are a significant driver of galaxy evolution over the last eight billion years.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f1a23938d929a31b363b51848695e7a600294cb7

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Citations in the corpus

The Redshift Evolution of Wet, Dry, and Mixed Galaxy Mergers from Close Galaxy Pairs in the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey (2008, background): “…1995; Neuschaefer et al. 1997; Patton et al. 1997; Carlberg et al. 2000; Le Fèvre et al. 2000; Patton et al. 2002; Conselice et al. 2003; Bundy et al. 2004; Lin et al. 2004; Cassata et al. 2005; Conselice 2006; Bell et al. 2006b; Lotz et al. 2008; Kampczyk et al. 2007; Kartaltepe et al. 2007).”
Alignment of the Spins of Supermassive Black Holes Prior to Coalescence (2007, methodology): “Some tens of percent of galaxies appear to have undergone at least one merger with mass ratio > 0.25 within redshift z < 1 (for recent observational results with different methods, see Bell et al. 2006b; Lotz et al. 2006, and for a recent simulation see Maller et al. 2006).”
Galaxy Zoo: Disentangling the Environmental Dependence of Morphology and Colour ⋆ (2008, background): “…〈Pmg〉 2 R rf 0 dr r2 (1 + WPmg(r)) 4πn̄gal R rf 0 dr r2 (1 + ξ(r)) , (6) where the denominator is the close pair fraction, (see Masjedi et al. 2006, Bell et al. 2006) and WPmg(r) is the realspace Pmg weighted correlation function, normalized by the mean mark 〈Pmg〉 (which is approximately…”
Ongoing assembly of massive galaxies by major merging in large groups and clusters from the SDSS (2007, methodology): “1 < z < 0.9 dissipationless mergers in Bell et al. (2006a).”
Galaxy merger morphologies and time-scales from simulations of equal-mass gas-rich disc mergers (2008, background): “A few works have attempted to quantify the observability time-scales using only the stellar particles (Conselice 2006; Bell et al. 2006b) or gas particles (Iono, Yun, & Mihos 2004) and ignoring the effects of dust and age-dependent stellar luminosities.”
A calibration of the relation between the abundance of close galaxy pairs and the rate of galaxy mergers (2008, result): “The most recent attempts to estimate merger rates with each of these methods (Lin et al. 2004; Bell et al. 2006; Lotz et al. 2008) have indicated that evolution with redshift is much weaker than found in earlier observational analyses (e.g. Patton et al. 2002; Conselice et al. 2003; Bundy et al.…”
HOW DO DISKS SURVIVE MERGERS? (2008, unknown): “1 : 3) sincez∼ 2− 3 (Lotz et al. 2008; Bell et al. 2006; Bridge et al. 2007; Lin et al. 2008; Kartaltepe et al. 2007).”
SELF-CONSISTENT MODELS OF THE AGN AND BLACK HOLE POPULATIONS: DUTY CYCLES, ACCRETION RATES, AND THE MEAN RADIATIVE EFFICIENCY (2007, result): “Observational estimates of the galaxy merger rate and its mass dependence span a substantial range (see, e.g., Bell et al. 2006; Conroy et al. 2007; Masjedi et al. 2008, and references therein), andPmerg= 0.5 is roughly consistent with the high end of these estimates.”
THE BULK OF THE BLACK HOLE GROWTH SINCE z ∼ 1 OCCURS IN A SECULAR UNIVERSE: NO MAJOR MERGER–AGN CONNECTION (2010, background): “According to the current paradigm of hierarchical structure formation, major mergers are a crucial element in the assembly and growth of present-day galaxies (e.g., Kauffmann et al. 1993; Cole et al. 2000; Somerville et al. 2001; Bell et al. 2006; Jogee et al. 2009; Robaina et al. 2010).”
Galaxy Zoo: the fraction of merging galaxies in the SDSS and their morphologies (2009, background): “…have concentrated mostly on merger rates (Carlberg et al. 2000; Le Fevre et al. 2000; Patton et al. 2002; Conselice et al. 2003; Bundy et al. 2005; Bell et al. 2006; Conselice, Rajgor & Myers 2008; Lin et al. 2008; Lotz et al. 2008a; Hsieh. et al. 2008, Patton et al. 2008), with comparatively…”
THE GREATER IMPACT OF MERGERS ON THE GROWTH OF MASSIVE GALAXIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR MASS ASSEMBLY AND EVOLUTION SINCE z ≃ 1 (2009, methodology): “With this in mind, we note that the value of fpair =0.02–0.03 measured by both Bell et al. (2006a) using COMBO-17 as well as the kinematic pair study of Lin et al. (2004) and Lin et al. (2008) agrees with our findings here.”
HISTORY OF GALAXY INTERACTIONS AND THEIR IMPACT ON STAR FORMATION OVER THE LAST 7 Gyr FROM GEMS (2009, background): “Studies based on close pairs report a major merger fraction of ∼ 2% to 10% over z∼ 0.2 to 1.2 (Lin 2004; Kartaltepe et al. 2007; de Ravel et al. 2008) and ∼ 5% for massive galaxies at z∼ 0.4 to 0.8 (Bell et al. 2006).”
Formation of Early-Type Galaxies from Cosmological Initial Conditions (2005, background): “…plausible and popular idea that ‘‘dry merging’’ (i.e., merging of predominantly stellar systems) among elliptical systems (Tran et al. 2005; van Dokkum 2005; Bell et al. 2006a, 2006b) pushes more and more of the mass over the observational cutoff to provide an increased number of 0.5Y2 L galaxies.”
The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: the role of galaxy environment in the cosmic star formation history (2007, background): “Many systematic problems could affect one method or another; for instance, Bell et al. (2006) argues that some of the variance in results is attributable to accounting errors in converting pair fractions into merger rates.”
RED NUGGETS AT z ∼ 1.5: COMPACT PASSIVE GALAXIES AND THE FORMATION OF THE KORMENDY RELATION (2008, background): “Mergers, both gas-rich and dissipationless, are also thought to be important in the growth of the red sequence and evidence, both direct and indirect, supports that this is occuring at intermediate and low redshifts (e.g., Bell et al. 2006b, and the references therein).”
Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): survey diagnostics and core data release (2010, background): “…et al. 2006), the recent cosmic star formation history (e.g. Heavens et al. 2004), group catalogues (e.g. Eke et al. 2004), merger rates (e.g. Bell et al. 2006), quantification of largescale structure (e.g. Percival et al. 2001), galaxy clustering (e.g. Norberg et al. 2001) and, in…”
Galaxy Zoo: the properties of merging galaxies in the nearby Universe – local environments, colours, masses, star formation rates and AGN activity (2009, result): “On the other hand, the suggested alternative (that the time scales for a merger to reach a relaxed state vary depending on the internal properties of the galaxies) seems intrinsically plausible and has been corroborated by other studies (Bell et al. 2006; Lotz et al. 2008a; Lotz et al. 2008b).”