Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 401, Issue 2, Pages 1043-1056Publisher
WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.15686.x
Keywords
catalogues; galaxies: elliptical and lenticular; cD; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: general; galaxies: interactions; galaxies: spiral
Categories
Funding
- John Templeton Foundation
- Royal Commission for the Exhibition
- Leverhulme Early-Career Fellowship
- Worcester College
- BIPAC institute, Oxford
- Levehulme Trust
- STFC
- Balliol College, Oxford
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/F009186/1, ST/G002630/1, ST/F002335/1, ST/F00298X/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- STFC [ST/F009186/1, ST/G002630/1, ST/F00298X/1, ST/F002335/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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We present the largest, most homogeneous catalogue of merging galaxies in the nearby Universe obtained through the Galaxy Zoo project - an interface on the World Wide Web enabling large-scale morphological classification of galaxies through visual inspection of images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The method converts a set of visually inspected classifications for each galaxy into a single parameter (the 'weighted-merger-vote fraction,' f(m)) which describes our confidence that the system is part of an ongoing merger. We describe how f(m) is used to create a catalogue of 3003 visually selected pairs of merging galaxies from the SDSS in the redshift range 0.005 < z < 0.1. We use our merger sample and values of f(m) applied to the SDSS Main Galaxy Spectral sample to estimate that the fraction of volume-limited (M(r) < -20.55) major mergers (1/3 < M*(1)/M*(2) < 3) in the nearby Universe is 1-3 x C per cent, where C similar to 1.5 is a correction factor for spectroscopic incompleteness. Having visually classified the morphologies of the constituent galaxies in our mergers, we find that the spiral-to-elliptical ratio of galaxies in mergers is higher by a factor of similar to 2 relative to the global population. In a companion paper, we examine the internal properties of these merging galaxies and conclude that this high spiral-to-elliptical ratio in mergers is due to a longer time-scale over which mergers with spirals are detectable compared to mergers with ellipticals.
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