A catalog of merging dwarf galaxies in the local universe

Abstract

We present the largest publicly available catalog of interacting dwarf galaxies. It includes 177 nearby merging dwarf galaxies of stellar mass M$_{*}$ $<$ 10$^{10}$M$_{\sun}$ and redshifts z $<$ 0.02. These galaxies are selected by visual inspection of publicly available archival imaging from two wide-field optical surveys (SDSS III and the Legacy Survey), and they possess low surface brightness features that are likely the result of an interaction between dwarf galaxies. We list UV and optical photometric data which we use to estimate stellar masses and star formation rates. So far, the study of interacting dwarf galaxies has largely been done on an individual basis, and lacks a sufficiently large catalog to give statistics on the properties of interacting dwarf galaxies, and their role in the evolution of low mass galaxies. We expect that this public catalog can be used as a reference sample to investigate the effects of the tidal interaction on the evolution of star-formation, morphology/structure of dwarf galaxies. Our sample is overwhelmingly dominated by star-forming galaxies, and they are generally found significantly below the red-sequence in the color-magnitude relation. The number of early-type galaxies is only 3 out of 177. We classify them, according to observed low surface brightness features, into various categories including shells, stellar streams, loops, antennae or simply interacting. We find that dwarf-dwarf interactions tend to prefer the low density environment. Only 41 out of the 177 candidate dwarf-dwarf interaction systems have giant neighbors within a sky projected distance of 700 kpc and a line of sight radial velocity range $\pm$700 km/s and, compared to the LMC-SMC, they are generally located at much larger sky-projected distances from their nearest giant neighbor.