North Ecliptic Pole merging galaxy catalogue
W. J. Pearson, L. E. Suelves, S. C.-C. Ho, N. Oi, S. Brough, B. W., Holwerda, A. M. Hopkins, T.-C. Huang, H. S. Hwang, L. S. Kelvin, S. J. Kim,, \'A. R. L\'opez-S\'anchez, K. Ma{\l}ek, C. Pearson, A. Poliszczuk, A. Pollo,, V. Rodriguez-Gomez, H. Shim, Y. Toba, L. Wang

TL;DR
This paper presents a new catalogue of merging galaxies in the North Ecliptic Pole region, using neural networks and visual verification to identify mergers and analyze their properties across redshifts.
Contribution
The study introduces a hybrid approach combining neural networks and expert visual checks to efficiently identify merging galaxies in a specific sky region.
Findings
Neural networks correctly identify over 79% of mergers.
Approximately 10,195 merger candidates identified, with 2,109 confirmed visually.
Merger fraction increases with redshift and shows mild star-formation rate enhancement.
Abstract
We aim to generate a catalogue of merging galaxies within the 5.4 sq. deg. North Ecliptic Pole over the redshift range . To do this, imaging data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam are used along with morphological parameters derived from these same data. The catalogue was generated using a hybrid approach. Two neural networks were trained to perform binary merger non-merger classifications: one for galaxies with and another for . Each network used the image and morphological parameters of a galaxy as input. The galaxies that were identified as merger candidates by the network were then visually checked by experts. The resulting mergers will be used to calculate the merger fraction as a function of redshift and compared with literature results. We found that 86.3% of galaxy mergers at and 79.0% of mergers at are…
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