Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Galaxy close-pairs, mergers, and the future fate of stellar mass

Understand

We use a highly complete subset of the GAMA-II redshift sample to fully describe the stellar mass dependence of close-pairs and mergers between 10^8 Msun and 10^12 Msun.

• Using the analytic form of this fit we investigate the total stellar mass accreting onto more massive galaxies across all mass ratios.
• Depending on how conservatively we select our robust merging systems, the fraction of mass merging onto more massive companions is 2.0%-5.6%.
• Using the GAMA-II data we see no significant evidence for a change in the close-pair fraction between redshift $z = 0.05-0.2$.