Issue |
A&A
Volume 689, September 2024
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A312 | |
Number of page(s) | 17 | |
Section | Extragalactic astronomy | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202449360 | |
Published online | 20 September 2024 |
A study of interacting galaxies from the Arp-Madore catalog
Triggering of star formation and nuclear activity
1
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Calle Vía Láctea, s/n, 38205 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
2
Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, 38206 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
3
Departamento de Astronomia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, IF, CP 15051, Porto Alegre, 91501-970 RS, Brazil
4
Departamento de Astronomia, Instituto de Astronomia, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas da USP, Cidade Universitária, 05508-900 São Paulo, SP, Brazil
5
Departamento de Física, CCNE, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, 97105-900 Santa Maria, RS, Brazil
Received:
26
January
2024
Accepted:
31
May
2024
We present Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) spectroscopic observations of 95 galaxies from the Arp & Madore (1987) catalog of peculiar galaxies. These galaxies have been selected because they appear to be in pairs and small groups. These observations have enabled us to confirm that 60 galaxies are indeed interacting systems. For the confirmed interacting sample, we have built a matched control sample of isolated galaxies. We present an analysis of the stellar populations and nuclear activity in the interacting galaxies and compare them with the isolated galaxies. We find a median light (mass) fraction of 55% (10%) in the interacting galaxies coming from stellar populations younger than 2 Gyr and 28% (3%) in the case of the isolated galaxies. More than half of the interacting galaxies are dominated by this young stellar population, while in the isolated ones most of the light comes from older stellar populations. We used a combination of diagnostic diagrams (BPTs and WHAN) to classify the main ionization mechanisms of the gas. The interacting galaxies in our sample consistently show a higher fraction of active galactic nuclei (AGN) relative to the control sample, which ranges between 1.6 and 4 depending on the combination of diagnostic diagrams employed to classify the galaxies and the number of galaxies considered. Our study provides further observational evidence that interactions drive star formation and nuclear activity in galaxies and can have a significant impact on galaxy evolution.
Key words: galaxies: active / galaxies: evolution / galaxies: interactions / galaxies: nuclei / galaxies: peculiar / galaxies: star formation
© The Authors 2024
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article is published in open access under the Subscribe to Open model. Subscribe to A&A to support open access publication.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.