Mergers of luminous early-type galaxies

Abstract

We have made a careful selection of a large complete volume-limited sample (1209) of projected close pairs (7<r_p<50 kpc) of luminous early-type galaxies (M_r<-21.5) in the local universe (z<0.12) from the SDSS data. 249 (21%) of them show interaction features, which suggests that about 0.8% of the galaxies are merging. We derived a comoving volume merger rate of ~(1.0+/-0.4)\times 10^{-5} Mpc^{-3} Gyr^{-1} for luminous early-type galaxies. This is a direct observational determination of the merger rate of luminous galaxies in the local universe. We also obtained the chirp mass distribution of supermassive black hole (SMBH) binary following log[Phi(log M /M_{odot})]=(21.7+/-4.2)-(3.0+/-0.5)log M/M_{odot}. With less assumptions than previous works, we estimated the strain amplitude of the gravitational wave (GW) background from coalescence of SMBH binaries at frequency 10^{-9}-10^{-7} Hz.