Investigating How Type of Galactic Bar Impacts Bar Quenching

We are happy to announce the acceptance of the latest science team paper making use of Galaxy Zoo classifications (the image below is a link to the paper). Also see this list of all Galaxy Zoo Science Team Publications (which is mostly complete, usually!).

This work was led by (at the time) undergraduate student Petra Mengistu (since Fall 2024 in the PhD Program at UCSC). Petra started this work as an undergraduate, spending the summer of 2023 working at Oxford with the Galaxy Zoo science team there, and then returning to Haverford to continue the work for her undergraduate senior thesis. I’m writing this as a very proud (former) undergraduate supervisor today.

As the”Part II” in the title suggests, this work is a follow-on from previous work. Tobias Geron already wrote in detail about the first paper on the blog Slow Strong Bars Affect Their Hosts the Most which has a lot of the background needed to understand this follow-on result.

One fun thing we added was a look at the morphology of the ionized hydrogen around the bars in these galaxies (using data from the “MaNGA Survey”). This “Halpha” brightness can be traced by flux or “equivalent width” or EW (which is a measure of relative brightness compared to the stars you see in the normal images you are used to). It turns out this gas, which shows off where stars are currently forming in a galaxy – has a lot of different interesting shapes in barred galaxies, e.g. being found all along the bar, in rings or nodes.

The below image is a part of the sixth Figure in Petra’s paper.

There’s many more result in the paper, but I need to keep this blog post short for now.

Continuing to publish papers about bars in galaxies is also fun for me, as I’ve been working on trying to understand bars in galaxies using Galaxy Zoo classifications for well over a decade at this point. It’s great to see this work continuing with new samples and data and new understanding of the important role these structures play in stopping star formation in spiral galaxies. I wrote about bars for the blog “What’s all the Fuss about Bars in Galaxies” in 2015, or you can read this blog post from way back in 2010 (!) about our first Galaxy Zoo paper wondering “Do Bars Kill Galaxies”.

So thanks again for all the classifications. I’m excited for the future of this scientific area looking more at bars in the more distant universe (so looking back in time), which we already started with “Looking for Bars in Faraway Galaxies“, but I’m sure there will be much more to come.