Stronger bars help shut down star formation

Hi everyone!

I’m Tobias Géron, a PhD student at Oxford. I have been using the classifications of the Galaxy Zoo DECaLS (GZD) project to study differences between weak and strong bars in the context of galaxy evolution. We have made significant amount of progress and I was able to present some results a couple of weeks ago at a (virtual) conference in the form of a poster, which I would love to share with you here as well.

To summarise: I have been using the classifications from GZD to identify many weakly and strongly barred galaxies. Some example galaxies can be found in the first figure on the poster. As the name already implies, strong bars tend to be longer and more obvious than weak bars. But what exactly does this mean for the galaxy in which they appear?

One of the major properties of a galaxies is whether it is still forming stars. Interestingly, in Figure 2 we observe that strong bars appear much more frequently in galaxies that are not forming stars (called “quiescent galaxies”). This is not observed for the weak bars. This suggests one of two things: either the strong bar helps to shut down star formation in galaxies or it is easier to form a strong bar in a quiescent galaxy.

In an attempt to answer this chicken or egg problem, we turn to Figure 3. Here, we show that the rate of star formation in the centre of the galaxy is highest for the strongly barred galaxies that are still star forming. This suggests that those galaxies will empty their gas reservoir quicker, which is needed to make stars, and are on a fast-track to quiescence. 

I’m also incredibly happy to say that we’ve written a paper on this as well, which has recently been accepted for publication! You can currently find it here. Apart from the results described above, we also delve more deeply into whether weak and strong bars are fundamentally different physical phenomena. Feel free to check it out if you’re interested!

It’s amazing too see all this coming to fruition, but it couldn’t have been possible without the amazing efforts of our citizen scientists, so I want to thank every single volunteer for all their time and dedication. We have mentioned this in the paper too, but your efforts are individually acknowledged here. Thank you!

Cheers,

Tobias