This paper studies morphological properties of 103 green valley FIR active and 2609 non-active galaxies presented in Mahoro et al. (2017). The photometric data from the COSMOS survey were used, and the morphological parameters, such as Abraham and Conselice-Bershady concentration indices, Gini, M20 moment of light, and asymmetry, were analysed taking into account public catalogues. Furthermore, a visual classification of galaxies was performed. We found that the fraction of peculiar galaxies with clear signs of interactions and mergers is significantly higher in AGN (38%) than non-AGN (19%) green valley galaxies, while non-AGN galaxies from our sample are predominantly spirals (46%). We found that the largest fraction of our green valley galaxies is located on the main-sequence (MS) of star formation, independently on morphology, which is in contrast with most of previous studies carried out in optical. We also found that FIR AGN green valley galaxies have significantly higher star formation rates in all analysed morphological types. Therefore, our results suggest that interactions and mergers obtained in the high fraction of FIR AGN contribute significantly to high star formation rates observed in the selected sample, but are not the only mechanism responsible for enhancing star formation, and others such as AGN positive feedback could contribute as well. In future we will study in more details the possibility of AGN positive feedback through the spectroscopic analysis of public and our SALT data.

The distribution of galaxies has been studied to show the difference between the blue cloud and red sequence and to define the green valley region. However, there are still many open questions regarding the importance of the green valley for understanding the morphological transformation and evolution of galaxies, how galaxies change from late-type to early-type and the role of AGN in galaxy formation and evolution scenario. The work focused on studying in more details the properties of green valley galaxies by testing the six most used selection criteria, differences between them, and how they may affect the main results and conclusions. The main findings are that, by selecting the green valley galaxies using different criteria, we are selecting different types of galaxies in terms of their stellar masses, sSFR, SFR, spectroscopic classification and morphological properties, where the difference was more significant for colour criteria than for sSFR and SFR vs. M* criteria.

In this study, we analysed active galactic nuclei in the “green valley” by comparing active and non-active galaxies using data from the COSMOS field. We found that most of our X-ray detected active galactic nuclei with far-infrared emission have star formation rates higher than the ones of normal galaxies of the same stellar mass range.