Bibcode
López-Sanjuan, Carlos; Balcells, Marc; García-Dabó, Cesar Enrique; Prieto, Mercedes; Cristóbal-Hornillos, David; Eliche-Moral, M. Carmen; Abreu, David; Erwin, Peter; Guzmán, Rafael
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 694, Issue 1, pp. 643-653 (2009).
Advertised on:
3
2009
Journal
Citations
37
Refereed citations
32
Description
We measure the fraction of galaxies undergoing disk-disk major mergers
(f mph m ) at intermediate redshifts (0.35 <=
z < 0.85) by studying the asymmetry index A of galaxy images. Results
are provided for B- and K s-band absolute magnitude selected
samples from the Groth strip in the galaxy origins and young assembly
photometric survey. Three sources of systematic error are carefully
addressed and quantified. The effects of the large errors in the
photometric redshifts and asymmetry indices are corrected with
maximum-likelihood techniques. Biases linked to the redshift degradation
of the morphological information in the images are treated by measuring
asymmetries on images artificially redshifted to a reference redshift of
zd = 0.75. Morphological K-corrections are further
constrained by remaining within redshifts where the images sample
redward of 4000 Å. We find that: (1) our data allow for a robust
merger fraction to be provided for a single redshift bin, which we
center at z = 0.6. (2) Merger fractions at that z have lower values than
previous determinations: f mph m =
0.045+0.014 -0.011 for MB <= -20
galaxies, and f mph m = 0.031+0.013
-0.009 for M_{K_s} ≤ -23.5 galaxies. And, (3) failure to
address the effects of the large observational errors leads to
overestimating f mph m by factors of 10%-60%.
Combining our results with those on other B-band selected samples, and
parameterizing the merger fraction evolution as f mph m
(z) = f mph m (0)(1 + z) m , we
obtain that m = 2.9 ± 0.8, and f mph m (0)
= 0.012 ± 0.004. For an assumed merger timescale between 0.35-0.6
Gyr, these values imply that only 20%-35% of present-day MB
<= -20 galaxies have undergone a disk-disk major merger since z ~ 1.
Assuming a K s-band mass-to-light ratio not varying with
luminosity, we infer that the merger rate of galaxies with stellar mass
M sstarf gsim 3.5 × 1010 M sun is
real m = 1.6+0.9 -0.6 ×
10-4 Mpc-3 Gyr-1 at z = 0.6. When we
compare with previous studies at similar redshifts, we find that the
merger rate decreases when mass increases.