Galaxy Zoo: The properties of merging galaxies in the nearby Universe - local environments, colours, masses, star-formation rates and AGN activity

Understand

Following the study of Darg et al.

• (2009; hereafter D09a) we explore the environments, optical colours, stellar masses, star formation and AGN activity in a sample of 3003 pairs of merging galaxies drawn from the SDSS using visual classifications from the Galaxy Zoo project.
• While D09a found that the spiral-to-elliptical ratio in (major) mergers appeared higher than that of the global galaxy population, no significant differences are found between the environmental distributions of mergers and a randomly selected control sample.
• This makes the high occurrence of spirals in mergers unlikely to be an environmental effect and must, therefore, arise from differing time-scales of detectability for spirals and ellipticals.