J/ApJ/948/40 Interacting galaxies from HST archives (O'Ryan+, 2023)
Harnessing the Hubble Space Telescope archives: a catalog of 21,926 interacting
galaxies.
O'Ryan D., Merin B., Simmons B.D., Vojtekova A., Anku A., Walmsley M.,
Garland I.L., Geron T., Keel W., Kruk S., Lintott C.J., Mantha K.B.,
Masters K.L., Reerink J., Smethurst R.J., Thorne M.R.
<Astrophys. J., 948, 40 (2023)>
=2023ApJ...948...40O 2023ApJ...948...40O
ADC_Keywords: Galaxies, interacting; Photometry, HST; Optical; Galaxy catalogs;
References
Keywords: Interacting galaxies ; Computational methods ; Catalogs
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.
Description:
We search through the European Space Agency's Hubble Space Telescope
(HST) Science Archive using a CNN to predict whether an image
contains an interacting system, from among the 126 million extended
objects in the Hubble Source Catalog (Whitmore+ 2016, II/342).
The observational data is directly from the Hubble Science Archive and
is accessed from the new ESA Datalabs platform. The repository
contains approximately 100TB of data from HST. This repository spans
all HST instruments and filters. See Section 2.
We incorporate classifications from all major Galaxy Zoo projects. See
Section 4.1.
File Summary:
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FileName Lrecl Records Explanations
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ReadMe 80 . This file
table4.dat 171 358 Table of observations used
catalog.dat 894 21926 Final catalog of interacting galaxies
img/* . 21926 *Individual images in jpeg format
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Note on img/*: These images have been saved as 150x150 gray images using only
the F814W filter of the HST. Different dimension images/multi-band
photometry will have to be found by the user. When input into our
Zoobot model, these had been resized to 300x300.
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Description of file:
interacting-catalogue.csv is the original CSV file as downloaded at:
https://zenodo.org/records/7684876
See also:
II/261 : GOODS initial results (Giavalisco+, 2004)
II/342 : Hubble Source Catalog (V1 and V2) (Whitmore+, 2016)
VII/74 : Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies (Arp 1966)
VII/205 : Faint Interacting Galaxies (de Mello+ 1997)
J/A+A/424/371 : 1.4GHz First Look Survey (FLS) (Morganti+, 2004)
J/AJ/129/682 : Structural data of S+S galaxies (Hernandez-Toledo+, 2005)
J/AJ/130/2647 : Tidal features of nearby red galaxies (van Dokkum+, 2005)
J/ApJ/682/1020 : X-ray sources in NGC 4194 and NGC 7541 (Kaaret+, 2008)
J/AJ/137/383 : Globulars in PGC 6510, PGC 10922, PGC 4287 (Maybhate+, 2009)
J/MNRAS/407/2399 : AGN activity and black hole mass (McKernan+, 2010)
J/ApJS/186/427 : Detailed morphology of SDSS galaxies (Nair+, 2010)
J/ApJ/750/140 : Candidate globular clusters in NGC 1316 (Goudfrooij, 2012)
J/MNRAS/435/2835 : Morphological types from Galaxy Zoo 2 (Willett+, 2013)
J/ApJ/788/55 : HST/WFC3 SNR discoveries in M83 (NGC5236) (Blair+, 2014)
J/ApJ/825/L22 : BVRI LCs of type Ib supernova iPTF13bvn (Folatelli+, 2016)
J/ApJ/838/110 : Spectroscopic survey of ZwCl 0008.8+5215 (Golovich+, 2017)
J/MNRAS/479/415 : Galaxy mergers sample (Ackermann+, 2018)
J/ApJS/235/23 : LEGUS galaxies1 observations (Sabbi+, 2018)
J/ApJS/243/17 : Strong DES lens cand. from neural networks (Jacobs+, 2019)
J/ApJS/247/12 : Strong lens models for 37 clusters from SGAS (Sharon+, 2020)
J/ApJ/909/192 : HST/ACS photometry of Eridanus II (Gallart+, 2021)
J/ApJS/256/40 : HST imaging survey of low-z Swift-BAT AGNs (Kim+, 2021)
J/ApJ/908/18 : HST stellar photometry of Eridanus II (Simon+, 2021)
J/ApJ/930/81 : HST follow-up of a strong failed SN cand. (Jencson+, 2022)
J/A+A/661/A52 : North Ecliptic Pole merging galaxy cat. (Pearson+, 2022)
J/MNRAS/509/3966 : Galaxy Zoo DR1&2, DR5 and DeepL version (Walmsley+, 2022)
Byte-by-byte Description of file: table4.dat
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1- 5 I5 --- PropID [8183/16435] HST Proposal identifier
7- 39 A33 --- ObsID HST Observation identifier [obs_id] (1)
41- 50 A10 "D/M/Y" ObsDate Observation date (UT)
52- 88 A37 --- DOI ESA-specific dataset digital object identifier
90-171 A82 --- Ref Reference publications (ADS bibcode(s))
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Note (1): Observation ID here is the filename of the file of the observation
as contained on ESA Datalabs. On MAST they correspond to data URIs as:
mast:HST/product/{ObsID}_drc.fits
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Byte-by-byte Description of file: catalog.dat
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1- 5 I5 --- Seq [0/21925] Running sequence number
7- 19 I13 --- SourceID [4093375738/6000541707737] Source identifier
(image file name)
21- 31 F11.7 deg RAdeg Right ascension (J2000)
33- 43 F11.7 deg DEdeg Declination (J2000)
45- 52 F8.6 --- Pred [0.95/1] Interaction prediction
(int_prediction)
54- 881 A828 --- Ref Reference publications (ADS bibcode(s))
883- 894 A12 --- Status Status ("Unreferenced":14403 occurrences;
or "Referenced")
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History:
From electronic version of the journal for Table 4.
* interacting-catalogue.csv downloaded at:
http://zenodo.org/records/7684876
(End) Prepared by [AAS], Emmanuelle Perret [CDS] 06-May-2025