On the HI Content of MaNGA Major Merger Pairs

TL;DR

This study investigates the HI gas content in galaxy pairs at different merging stages, revealing mild depletion and enhanced star formation during pericentric passage, with new FAST observations detecting potential gas infall and AGN activity.

Contribution

It introduces kinematic asymmetry as a new indicator for merging stage and combines archival and new FAST data to analyze HI content in galaxy mergers.

Findings

HI gas fraction decreases by about 15% in major-merger pairs

Star formation rate and efficiency increase significantly during pericentric passage

Detection of an HI absorber suggests gas infall and possible AGN triggering

Abstract

The role of HI content in galaxy interactions is still under debate. To study the HI content of galaxy pairs at different merging stages, we compile a sample of 66 major-merger galaxy pairs and 433 control galaxies from the SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU survey. In this study, we adopt kinematic asymmetry as a new effective indicator to describe the merging stage of galaxy pairs. With archival data from the HI-MaNGA survey and new observations from the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), we investigate the differences in HI gas fraction ($f_{\text{HI}}$), star formation rate (SFR), and HI star formation efficiency ($\rm SFE_{\text{HI}}$) between the pair and control samples. Our results suggest that the HI gas fraction of major-merger pairs on average is marginally decreased by $\sim 15\%$ relative to isolated galaxies, implying mild HI depletion during galaxy interactions. Compared to isolated galaxies, pre-passage paired galaxies have similar $f_{\text{HI}}$, SFR and $\rm SFE_{\text{HI}}$, while pairs during pericentric passage have weakly decreased $f_{\text{HI}}$ ($-0.10\pm0.05$ dex), significantly enhanced SFR ($0.42\pm0.11$ dex) and $\rm SFE_{\text{HI}}$ ($0.48\pm0.12$ dex). When approaching the apocenter, paired galaxies show marginally decreased $f_{\text{HI}}$ ($-0.05\pm0.04$ dex), comparable SFR ($0.04\pm0.06$ dex) and $\rm SFE_{\text{HI}}$ ($0.08\pm0.08$ dex). We propose the marginally detected HI depletion may originate from the gas consumption in fuelling the enhanced $\rm H_2$ reservoir of galaxy pairs. In addition, new FAST observations also reveal an HI absorber ($N_{\text{HI}}\sim 4.7 \times 10^{21} \text{ cm}^{-2}$), which may suggest gas infalling and the triggering of AGN activity.