2016ApJ...832...90W

Tidal tails are created in major mergers involving disk galaxies. It remains to be explored how the tidal tails trace the assembly history of massive galaxies. We identify a sample of 461 merging galaxies with long tidal tails, from 35,076 galaxies mass-complete at M_*\geqslant10^9.5 M_☉ and 0.2\leqslantz\leqslant1, based on Hubble Space Telescope/ACS F814W imaging data and public catalogs of the COSMOS field. The long tails refer to those with length equal to or greater than the diameter of their host galaxies. The mergers with tidal tails are selected using our novel A_O-D_O technique for strong asymmetric features, along with visual examination. Our results show that the fraction of tidal-tailed mergers evolves mildly with redshift, as ∼(1+z)^2.0±0.4, and becomes relatively higher in less-massive galaxies, out to z = 1. With a timescale of 0.5 Gyr for the tidal-tailed mergers, we obtain that the occurrence rate of such mergers follows 0.01±0.007(1+z)^2.3±1.4 Gyr^–1, and corresponds to ∼0.3 events since z = 1, as well as roughly one-third of the total budget of major mergers from the literature. For disk-involved major mergers, nearly half of them have undergone a phase with long tidal tails.