A Nonparametric Morphological Analysis of H$\alpha$ Emission in Bright Dwarfs Using the Merian Survey

TL;DR

This study uses the Merian Survey's medium-band imaging to analyze the morphology of Hα emission in low-mass galaxies, revealing how star formation activity correlates with emission structure and galaxy dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel nonparametric method for estimating stellar continuum emission and compares Hα and continuum morphologies across a range of galaxy masses and star formation rates.

Findings

Hα asymmetry correlates with specific star formation rate (SSFR).

Low-mass, high-SSFR galaxies show compact, heterogeneous Hα emission.

High-mass galaxies' Hα morphology remains less constrained due to limited data.

Abstract

Using medium-band imaging from the newly released Merian Survey, we conduct a nonparametric morphological analysis of H$\alpha$ emission maps and stellar continua for a sample of galaxies with $8\lesssim\log (M_\star/M_\odot) < 10.3$ at $0.064<z<0.1$. We present a novel method for estimating the stellar continuum emission through the Merian Survey's N708 medium-band filter, which we use to measure H$\alpha$ emission and produce H$\alpha$ maps for our sample of galaxies with seven-band Merian photometry and available spectroscopy. We measure nonparametric morphological statistics for the H$\alpha$ and stellar continuum images, explore how the morphology of the H$\alpha$ differs from the continuum, and investigate how the parameters evolve with the galaxies' physical properties. In agreement with previous results for more massive galaxies, we find that the asymmetry of the stellar continuum increases with specific star formation rate (SSFR) and we extend the trend to lower masses, also showing that it holds for the asymmetry of the H$\alpha$ emission. We find that the lowest-mass galaxies with the highest SSFR have H$\alpha$ emission that is consistently heterogeneous and compact, while the less active galaxies in this mass range have H$\alpha$ emission that appears diffuse. At higher masses, our data do not span a sufficient range in SSFR to evaluate whether similar trends apply. We conclude that high SSFRs in low-mass galaxies likely result from dynamical instabilities that compress a galaxy's molecular gas to a dense region near the center.