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Description
We explore the properties of "peculiar" early-type galaxies (ETGs) in the local Universe that show (faint) morphological signatures of recent interactions such as tidal tails, shells and dust lanes. Standard-depth (~51s exposure) multicolour galaxy images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) are combined with the significantly (~2mag) deeper monochromatic images from the public SDSS Stripe82 (-50{deg}<{alpha}<59{deg}, -1.25{deg}<{delta}<1.25{deg}) to extract, through careful visual inspection, a robust sample of nearby (z<0.05), luminous (M_r_<-20.5) ETGs, including a subset of ~70 peculiar systems. ~18% of ETGs exhibit signs of disturbed morphologies (e.g. shells), while ~7% show evidence of dust lanes and patches. An analysis of optical emission-line ratios indicates that the fraction of peculiar ETGs that are Seyferts or LINERs (19.4%) is twice the corresponding values in their relaxed counterparts (10.1%). LINER-like emission is the dominant type of nebular activity in all ETG classes, plausibly driven by stellar photoionization associated with recent star formation. An analysis of ultraviolet-optical colours indicates that, regardless of the luminosity range being considered, the fraction of peculiar ETGs that have experienced star formation in the last Gyr is a factor of ~1.5 higher than that in their relaxed counterparts. The spectrophotometric results strongly suggest that the interactions that produce the morphological peculiarities also induce low-level recent star formation which, based on the recent literature, are likely to contribute a few per cent of the stellar mass over the last ~1Gyr. Peculiar ETGs preferentially inhabit low-density environments (outskirts of clusters, groups or the field), either due to high peculiar velocities in clusters making merging unlikely or because shell systems are disrupted through frequent interactions within a cluster crossing time.
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