Citation:
Date Published:
February 1, 2011Abstract:
Tidal interactions between galaxies can trigger star formation, whichcontributes to the global star formation rate (SFR) density of theuniverse and could be a factor in the transformation of blue,star-forming galaxies to red, quiescent galaxies over cosmic time. Weinvestigate tidally triggered star formation in isolated close galaxypairs drawn from the Prism Multi-Object Survey (PRIMUS), alow-dispersion prism redshift survey that has measured ~120,000 robustgalaxy redshifts over 9.1 deg2 out to z ~ 1. We select asample of galaxies in isolated galaxy pairs at redshifts 0.25 <= z<= 0.75, with no other objects within a projected separation of 300 h-1 kpc and Δz/(1 + z) = 0.01, and compare them to acontrol sample of isolated galaxies to test for systematic differencesin their rest-frame FUV - r and NUV - r colors as a proxy for relativespecific star formation rates (SSFRs). We find that galaxies inrp <= 50 h -1 kpc pairs have bluerdust-corrected UV - r colors on average than the control galaxies by-0.134 ± 0.045 mag in FUV - r and -0.075 ± 0.038 mag in