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A direct measurement of galaxy major and minor merger rates and stellar mass accretion histories at $z < 3$ using galaxy pairs in the REFINE survey by Conselice, Christopher J.; Mundy, Carl J.; Ferreira, Leonardo; Duncan, Kenneth is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is A direct measurement of galaxy major and minor merger rates and stellar mass accretion histories at $z < 3$ using galaxy pairs in the REFINE survey about?

We measure the role of major and minor mergers in forming the stellar masses of galaxies over $0<z<3$ using a combination of $\sim 3.25$ deg$^{2}$ of the deepest ground based near-infrared imaging taken to date as part of the REFINE survey. We measure the pair fraction and merger fractions for galaxy mergers of different mass ratios, and quantify the merger rate with newly measured time-scales derived from the Illustris simulation as a function of redshift and merger mass ratio. We find that over $0 < z < 3$ major mergers with mass ratios greater than 1:4 occur $0.85^{+0.19}_{-0.20}$ times on average, while minor mergers down to ratios of 1:10 occur on average $1.43^{+0.5}_{-0.3}$ times per galaxy. We also quantify the role of major and minor mergers in galaxy formation, whereby the increase in mass due to major mergers is $93^{+49}_{-31}$% while minor mergers account for an increase of $29^{+17}_{-12}$%; thus major mergers add more stellar mass to galaxies than minor mergers over this epoch. Overall, mergers will more than double the mass of massive galaxies over this epoch. Finally, we compare our results to simulations, finding that minor mergers are over predicted in Illustris

Author

Conselice, Christopher J.; Mundy, Carl J.; Ferreira, Leonardo; Duncan, Kenneth

Published

2022

Language

EN