Strong and weak bars in Galaxy Zoo

Good morning everyone,

My name is Tobias and I’m a new PhD student here at Oxford. I use the classifications everyone made in Galaxy Zoo to attempt to understand how galaxies evolve. Right now, I’m especially interested how bars affect galaxy evolution.

As some of you know, Galaxy Zoo currently asks to differentiate between so-called ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ bars. Below you can find some neat examples of both classes of galaxies that were identified using your classifications. It seems that the difference between strong and weak bars is some sort of combination between the length, width and brightness of the bar. 

The relationship between bars and galaxy evolution has been studied before by members of the Galaxy Zoo team, but the previous incarnation of Galaxy Zoo only allowed binary answers to the bar question: either there was a bar or not. The interesting bit, however, is to see whether strong and weak bars have different effects.

In fact, we have exciting preliminary data that suggests both types do behave differently in the context of galaxy evolution! When a galaxy evolves and moves from the ‘blue cloud’ to the ‘red sequence’ in the colour-magnitude diagram, its morphology and properties change (e.g.: its star formation rate decreases). This process is called ‘galaxy quenching’. With the new Galaxy Zoo data and the classifications that everyone involved made, we saw that galaxies with weak bars are found in both the blue cloud and the red sequence, whereas the strongly barred galaxies are very much clustered in the red sequence, as you can see below. In more detail, strongly barred galaxies only make up ~5% of the blue cloud, while making up ~16% of the red sequence. To contrast this, weakly barred galaxies have a much more modest increase, populating ~17% and ~21% of the blue cloud and red sequence, respectively.

This finding hints at a fundamental difference between the two types of bars, but in order to do real science we need to interpret the clustering of the strong bars correctly. Do strong bars cause the galaxy to quench and move up the red sequence or can a strong bar only form if the galaxy is already sufficiently quenched – a chicken or egg question on the scale of galaxies.

Before I end this post, I want to emphasise that this research is only made possible because of many volunteers, like yourself, that help classify galaxies and we are very grateful for your time and effort. However, this is only the start and a lot of work still needs to be done, so keep on classifying!

I hope to report on interesting new developments soon.

Cheers,
Tobias