Catalog of mergers/interacting pairs only

Thắng Huỳnh
  • 7 Feb

Dear all,

I am working with the interacting galaxies. However, as the name has already stated, it requires data of more than 1 galaxy for each pair to do the analysis. From TNG, it provides 2 main types of data which are Halo and Subhalo. As far as I know, when downloading the Subhalo data to use, it contains only the data of that galaxy and when downloading the Halo one, there could be other galaxies that do not belong to the interacting pairs and they possibly affect the analyzed results. I want to ask if there is a way to retrieve the data of the interacting galaxies only.

Thank you in advance,
Thang

Dylan Nelson
  • 8 Feb

Hi Thang,

There is no catalog of "galaxy merger pairs".

You are correct, two galaxies of a merging pair should be labeled as two different Subhalos, so you will never see a pair (or download all the data for a pair) by just looking at one Subhalo. You would want to look at the entire halo/group, and yes it will contain other (smaller) satellite galaxies. But you can make some definition for a pair, e.g. two subhalos with a stellar mass ratio greater than X separated by a maximum distance of Y, and then apply this to the subhalos of each halo.

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