2023/09/28 by Ren, Jian, Li, Nan, Liu, F. S. +3
#Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.16531
We revisit the evolution of galaxy morphology in the COSMOS field over the redshift range 0.2≤ z ≤ 1, using a large and complete sample of 33,605 galaxies with a stellar mass of log(M∗/M\odot )>9.5 with significantly improved redshifts and comprehensive non-parametric morphological parameters. Our sample has 13,881 (∼41.3%) galaxies with reliable spectroscopic redshifts and has more accurate photometric redshifts with a σ\rm NMAD ∼ 0.005. This paper is the first in a series that investigates merging galaxies and their properties. We identify 3,594 major merging galaxies through visual inspection and find 1,737 massive galaxy pairs with log(M_∗/M_\odot)>10.1. Among the family of non-parametric morphological parameters including C, A, S, Gini, M\rm 20, A\rm O, and D\rm O, we find that the outer asymmetry parameter A\rm O and the second-order momentum parameter M\rm 20 are the best tracers of merging features than other combinations. Hence, we propose a criterion for selecting candidates of violently star-forming mergers: M\rm 20> -3A\rm O+3 at 0.2 -6A\rm O+3.7 at 0.6