A catalog of morphologically identified merging galaxies

Abstract

We present a new catalog and images of interacting and merging galaxies obtained with morphological identification from Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope observations. We first used a morphological pattern recognition searching routine to select possible candidates, and then visually inspected the images of these candidates to identify true merging/interacting sources. We discover 15,147 new pairs ofmerging galaxies within 422 deg2 of Red Sequence Cluster Survey 2. Furthermore, we also find nine new candidates of galaxy clusters by searching for regions with significant density enhancements of merging galaxies. This catalog has the largest number of morphologically identified interacting and merging galaxies based on consistent searching criteria. These sources provide a uniform sample of merging galaxies for further photometric and spectroscopic studies of galaxy evolution. © 2009. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.