Interacting galaxies from HST archives Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. O'Ryan D.
  2. Merin B.
  3. Simmons B.D.
  4. Vojtekova A.
  5. Anku A.
  6. Walmsley M.,Garland I.L.
  7. Geron T.
  8. Keel W.
  9. Kruk S.
  10. Lintott C.J.
  11. Mantha K.B.,Masters K.L.
  12. Reerink J.
  13. Smethurst R.J.
  14. Thorne M.R.
  15. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

Mergers play a complex role in galaxy formation and evolution. Continuing to improve our understanding of these systems requires ever larger samples, which can be difficult (even impossible) to select from individual surveys. We use the new platform ESA Datalabs to assemble a catalog of interacting galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope science archives; this catalog is larger than previously published catalogs by nearly an order of magnitude. In particular, we apply the Zoobot convolutional neural network directly to the entire public archive of HST F814W images and make probabilistic interaction predictions for 126 million sources from the Hubble Source Catalog. We employ a combination of automated visual representation and visual analysis to identify a clean sample of 21,926 interacting galaxy systems, mostly with z<1. Sixty-five percent of these systems have no previous references in either the NASA Extragalactic Database or Simbad. In the process of removing contamination, we also discover many other objects of interest, such as gravitational lenses, edge-on protoplanetary disks, and "backlit" overlapping galaxies. We briefly investigate the basic properties of this sample, and we make our catalog publicly available for use by the community. In addition to providing a new catalog of scientifically interesting objects imaged by HST, this work also demonstrates the power of the ESA Datalabs tool to facilitate substantial archival analysis without placing a high computational or storage burden on the end user.

Keywords
  1. interacting-galaxies
  2. hst-photometry
  3. visible-astronomy
  4. galaxies
  5. catalogs
  6. astronomical-reference-materials
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2023ApJ...948...40O
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/948/40
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/948/40
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.19480040

Access

Web browser access HTML
https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/948/40
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/948/40
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/948/40
IVOA Table Access TAP
https://tapvizier.cds.unistra.fr/TAPVizieR/tap
Run SQL-like queries with TAP-enabled clients (e.g., TOPCAT).
IVOA Cone Search SCS
For use with a cone search client (e.g., TOPCAT).
https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/conesearch/J/ApJ/948/40/catalog?
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/conesearch/J/ApJ/948/40/catalog?
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/conesearch/J/ApJ/948/40/catalog?

History

2025-07-17T08:21:38Z
Resource record created
2025-07-17T08:21:38Z
Created
2025-08-01T20:11:27Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr