Non-parametric Morphologies of Mergers in the Illustris Simulation

TL;DR

This study uses the Illustris simulation to evaluate non-parametric morphological indicators of galaxy mergers, validating their effectiveness in recovering true merger rates and timescales in a cosmological context.

Contribution

It assesses the empirical non-parametric merger criteria within a cosmological simulation, providing calibration for observational merger rate estimates.

Findings

98% of galaxies above the demarcation line have recent or ongoing mergers.

G-M20 indicators are most sensitive to recent mergers (~0.14 Gyr).

Merger observability timescale is approximately 0.2 Gyr.

Abstract

We study non-parametric morphologies of mergers events in a cosmological context, using the Illustris project. We produce mock g-band images comparable to observational surveys from the publicly available Illustris simulation idealized mock images at $z=0$. We then measure non parametric indicators: asymmetry, Gini, $M_{20}$, clumpiness and concentration for a set of galaxies with $M_* >10^{10}$ M$_\odot$. We correlate these automatic statistics with the recent merger history of galaxies and with the presence of close companions. Our main contribution is to assess in a cosmological framework, the empirically derived non-parametric demarcation line and average time-scales used to determine the merger rate observationally. We found that 98 per cent of galaxies above the demarcation line have a close companion or have experienced a recent merger event. On average, merger signatures obtained from the $G-M_{20}$ criteria anticorrelate clearly with the elapsing time to the last merger event. We also find that the asymmetry correlates with galaxy pair separation and relative velocity, exhibiting the larger enhancements for those systems with pair separations $d < 50$ h$^{-1}$ kpc and relative velocities $V < 350$ km s$^{-1}$. We find that the $G-M_{20}$ is most sensitive to recent mergers ($\sim0.14$ Gyr) and to ongoing mergers with stellar mass ratios greater than 0.1. For this indicator, we compute a merger average observability time-scale of $\sim0.2$ Gyr, in agreement with previous results and demonstrate that the morphologically derived merger rate recovers the intrinsic total merger rate of the simulation and the merger rate as a function of stellar mass.