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D. Freedman Woods (Harvard Univ, Dept. of Astronomy), M. J. Geller (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory), E. J. Barton (UC Irvine, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy)
We study star formation in a sample of 281 galaxies in 139 pairs and compact groups drawn from the original CfA2 redshift survey and from our follow-up search for companions. We construct our sample with attention to including pairs with large luminosity contrast, and we find ~20% of the pairs have a magnitude difference | \Delta mR | \geq 2.0. These pairs with large luminosity contrast provide a substantial set of nearby representative cases of minor interactions, a central feature of the hierarchical galaxy formation model. We examine evidence for tidally triggered star formation in the sample as a whole and in sub-samples of intrinsic and relative luminosity. The galaxies in the sample as a whole exhibit strong correlations between the equivalent width of H\alpha and the projected spatial and line of sight velocity separation of the pair. Although the intrinsically bright galaxies, MZw < -19.5, and the galaxies with small magnitude differences, | \Delta mR | < 1.0, show strong correlations between the equivalent width of H\alpha and the projected spatial separation, we do not find a correlation between the equivalent width of H\alpha and the projected spatial separation for the low luminosity galaxies or the fainter of the pairs with large magnitude differences. We discuss the implications of our results.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: dwoods@cfa.harvard.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.