Star Formation Activity of Barred Spiral Galaxies

Abstract

We study the star formation activity of nearby galaxies with bars using a sample of late-type galaxies at 0.02≤ z ≤ 0.05489 and M r < −19.5 from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We compare the physical properties of strongly and weakly barred galaxies with those of non-barred galaxies that have stellar mass and redshift distributions similar to barred galaxies. We find that the star formation activity of strongly barred galaxies probed by starburstiness, g − r , NUV−r, and mid-infrared [3.4]−[12] colors is, on average, lower than that of non-barred galaxies. However, weakly barred galaxies do not show such a difference between barred and non-barred galaxies. The amounts of atomic and molecular gas in strongly barred galaxies are smaller than those of non-barred galaxies, and the gas metallicity is higher in strongly barred galaxies than in non-barred galaxies. The gas properties of weakly barred galaxies again show no difference from those of non-barred galaxies. We stack the optical spectra of barred and non-barred galaxies in several mass bins and fit to the stacked spectra with a spectral fitting code, STARLIGHT. We find no significant difference in stellar populations between barred and non-barred galaxies for both strongly and weakly barred galaxies. Our results are consistent with the idea that the star formation activity of barred galaxies is enhanced in the past along with significant gas consumption, and is currently lower than or similar to that of non-barred galaxies. The past star formation enhancement depends on the strength of bars.

The Gas-Star Formation Cycle in Nearby Star-forming Galaxies II. Resolved Distributions of CO and H$α$ Emission for 49 PHANGS Galaxies

“…However, while we indeed observe a higher fraction of CO-only sight lines in grand-design spiral galaxies (Figure 6), the CO-only fractions of Bar and Bar+GD are comparable to NS galaxies. It is probably because we do not consider bar strength in this work which is known to be correlated with SFR and star formation history of galaxies (Martinet & Friedli 1997;Carles et al 2016;Kim et al 2017). An alternative explanation could be that the gas distribution in barred galaxies is evolving heavily over time (e.g., Donohoe-Keyes et al 2019), leading to a wide variety in the gas distribution in the barred galaxies seen in PHANGS (Leroy et al 2021b).…”

STAR FORMATION RATE IN LATE-TYPE GALAXIES: I- THE Hα AND FUV INTEGRATED VALUES

“…Tubbs 1982;Kim et al 2018). Kim et al (2017), using a large sample of galaxies from Averaged star formation rate from the Hα line (left columns), the Hα emission from the H ii region only, (middle columns) and from the FUV continuum (right columns). The total sample was divided into several samples: Sm and dS (upper rows), barred and nonbarred galaxies (middle rows), and barred/non barred Sm and dS (bottom rows).…”

Study of Star Formation Rate and Metallicity of an Interacting Dwarf Galaxy NGC 2604

“…Tubbs (1982) proposed the probability of a decrease in total starforming rates due to bars in the galaxy. Kim et al (2017) showed that there is a significantly lower star-forming activity of strongly-barred galaxies than their unbarred counterparts. The SDSS optical image of the galaxy UGC 2604 is shown in Fig.…”