HST/WFPC2 morphologies and bar structures of field galaxies at 0.4 z 1

¹ GEPI, Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, 92195 Meudon, France
² Max-Planck Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany e-mail: zheng@mpia.de
³ Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Post Bag 4, Ganeshkhind, Pune 411007, India

Received: 6 September 2004
Accepted: 27 January 2005

Abstract

To address how the galaxy Hubble sequence is established and what physical processes are involved, we studied morphological properties and internal structures of field galaxies in the past (). In addition to structural parameters derived from bulge+disk decomposition, Zheng et al. (2004, A&A, 421, 847) introduced color maps in recognizing galaxies and properly classified morphologies of 36 luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs, m) ≥ 10¹¹ ). Here we presented morphological classification of a parallel 75 non-LIRG sample. Our examination revealed that a significant fraction of the galaxies shows remarkable morphological evolution, most likely related to the present-day spiral galaxies. Comparison of the morphological properties between LIRGs and non-LIRGs shows that the LIRGs contain a higher fraction of ongoing major mergers and systems with signs of merging/interaction. This suggests that the merging process is one of the major mechanisms to trigger star formation. We found that spiral LIRGs probably host much fewer bars than spiral non-LIRGs, suggesting that a bar is not efficient in triggering violent star formation. Differing from Abraham et al. (1999, MNRAS, 308, 569), no dramatic change of the bar frequency is detected up to redshift . The bar frequency of the distant spirals is similar to (and may be higher than) the present-day spirals in the rest-frame B band. We conclude that bar-driven secular evolution is not a major mechanism to drive morphological evolution of field galaxies, especially their bulge formation, which is more likely related to multiple intense star formation episodes during which the galaxies appear as LIRGs (Hammer et al. 2005, A&A, 430, 115).