KYDISC: Galaxy Morphology, Quenching, and Mergers in the Cluster Environment

We present the KASI-Yonsei Deep Imaging Survey of Clusters targeting 14 clusters at 0.015 ≲ z ≲ 0.144 using the Inamori Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph on the 6.5 m Magellan Baade telescope and the MegaCam on the 3.6 m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. We provide a catalog of cluster galaxies that lists magnitudes, redshifts, morphologies, bulge-to-total ratios, and local density. Based on the 1409 spectroscopically confirmed cluster galaxies brighter than -19.8 in the r band, we study galaxy morphology, color, and visual features generated by galaxy mergers. We see a clear trend between morphological content and cluster velocity dispersion, which was not presented by previous studies using local clusters. Passive spirals are preferentially found in a highly dense region (i.e., cluster center), indicating that they have gone through environmental quenching. In deep images (μ _r′ ∼ 27 ), 20% of our sample shows signatures of recent mergers, which is not expected from theoretical predictions and a low frequency of ongoing mergers in our sample (∼4%). Such a high fraction of recent mergers in the cluster environment supports a scenario that the merger events that made the features have preceded the galaxy accretion into the cluster environment. We conclude that mergers affect a cluster population mainly through the preprocessing of recently accreted galaxies.