Close Major Merger Pairs at $z=0$: Bulge-to-Total Ratio and Star Formation Enhancement

TL;DR

This study examines how the bulge-to-total ratio (B/T) affects star formation enhancement in close major-merger galaxy pairs, revealing that disk-dominated galaxies experience significant star formation boosts, especially in spiral+spiral pairs.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the dependence of star formation enhancement on galaxy structure, particularly B/T ratio, in different types of galaxy pairs.

Findings

Star formation enhancement is significant only in galaxies with B/T<0.3.

Disky SFGs in S+S pairs show strong molecular gas and star formation rate enhancements.

No significant star formation or gas content enhancement is observed in S+E pairs.

Abstract

We present a study of the bulge-to-total ratio (B/T) of a Ks-band-selected sample of 88 close major-merger pairs of galaxies (H-KPAIR) based on 2-D decomposition of SDSS r-band images with \textsc{galfit}. We investigate the dependence of the interaction-induced specific star formation rate enhancement ($\rm sSFR_{enh}$) on the B/T ratio, and the effects of this dependence on the differences between star-forming galaxies (SFGs) in spiral+spiral (S+S) and spiral+elliptical (S+E) pairs. Of all 132 spiral galaxies in H-KPAIR, the 44 in S+E pairs show higher B/T than those in the 44 S+S pairs, with means of $\rm B/T = 0.35 \pm 0.05$ and $\rm B/T = 0.26 \pm 0.03$, respectively. There is a strong negative dependence of $\rm sSFR_{enh}$ on the B/T ratio and only paired SFGs with $\rm B/T<0.3$ show significant ($>5\sigma$) enhancement. Paired SFGs in S+S pairs show a similar trend, and many disky SFGs ($\rm B/T<0.1$) in S+S have strong sSFR enhancements ($\rm sSFR_{enh} > 0.7$~dex). For SFGs in S+E, the sSFR has no clear B/T dependence, nor any significant enhancement in any B/T bin. Disky SFGs in S+S show significant ($>4\sigma$) enhancement in the molecular gas content ($\rm M_{H_2}/M_{star}$), while SFGs in S+E have no such enhancement in any B/T bin. No significant enhancement on total gas content ($\rm M_{gas}/M_{star}$) is found in any B/T bin for paired galaxies. The star formation efficiency of either the total gas ($\rm SFE_{gas} = SFR/M_{gas}$) or the molecular gas ($\rm SFE_{H_2} = SFR/M_{H_2}$) does not depend on the B/T ratio. The only significant ($>4\sigma$) SFE enhancement found for paired SFGs is the $\rm SFE_{gas}$ for disky SFGs in S+S pairs.