Real galaxy mergers from galaxy pair catalogs

Understand

Mergers of galaxies are extremely violent events shaping their evolution.

• Such events are thought to trigger starbursts and, possibly, black hole accretion.
• Nonetheless, it is still not clear how to know the fate of a galaxy pair from the data available at a given time, limiting our ability to constrain the exact role of mergers.
• In this paper we use the lightcone of the Horizon-AGN simulation, for which we know the fate of each pair, to test three selection processes aiming at identifying true merging pairs.