NIR Luminosity Function of Galaxies in Close Major-Merger Pairs and Mass Dependence of Merger Rate

Abstract

A sample of close major-merger pairs (projected separation $5\le \mathrm{r}\le 20{\mathrm{h}}^{-1}$ kpc, ${\mathrm{K}}_{\mathrm{s}}$ band magnitude difference $\delta {\mathrm{K}}_{\mathrm{s}}\le 1$ mag) is selected from the matched 2MASS-2dFGRS catalog of Cole et al. (2001). The pair primaries are brighter than ${\mathrm{K}}_{\mathrm{s}}=12.5$ mag. After corrections for various biases, the comparison between counts in the paired galaxy sample and counts in the parent sample shows that for the local `M* galaxies' sampled by flux limited surveys, the fraction of galaxies in the close major-merger pairs is 1.70$\pm 0.32$. Using 38 paired galaxies in the sample, a ${\mathrm{K}}_{\mathrm{s}}$ band luminosity function (LF) is calculated. This is the first unbiased LF for a sample of objectively defined interacting/merging galaxies in the local universe, while all previously determined LFs of paired galaxies are biased by mistreating paired galaxies as singles. A stellar mass function (MF) is translated from the LF. Compared to the LF/MF of 2MASS galaxies, a differential pair fraction function is derived. The results suggest a trend in the sense that less massive galaxies may have lower chance to be involved in close major-merger pairs than more massive galaxies. The algorithm presented in this paper can be easily applied to much larger samples of 2MASS galaxies with redshifts in near future.

Accepted by ApJL, 16 pages, 2 figures

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