We present new results on the physical nature of infrared-luminous sources at 0.5<z0.9mJy. We find many (~60%) of our sources to possess an important bulge and/or central point source component, most of which reveal additional underlying structures after subtraction of a best-fit Sersic (or Sersic+PSF) profile. Based on visual inspection of the NIC2 images and their residuals, we estimate that ~80% of all our sources are mergers. We calculate lower and upper limits on the merger fraction to be 62% and 91%, respectively. At z3.36) quasars to live in faint and compact hosts and show that these are likely high-redshift analogs of local dense-core mergers. We find late-stage mergers to possess predominantly unobscured AGN spectra, but do not observe other morphological classes to carry any specific combination of {tau}9.7um and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) equivalent width.

Cone search capability for table J/ApJ/730/125/table5 (Morphology of the 24um-selected galaxies)