Galaxy Zoo : Kinematics of strongly and weakly barred galaxies

Géron, Tobias and Smethurst, Rebecca J and Lintott, Chris and Kruk, Sandor and Masters, Karen L and Simmons, Brooke and Mantha, Kameswara Bharadwaj and Walmsley, Mike and Garma-Oehmichen, L and Drory, Niv and Lane, Richard R (2023) Galaxy Zoo : Kinematics of strongly and weakly barred galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 521 (2). pp. 1775-1793. ISSN 0035-8711

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Abstract

We study the bar pattern speeds and corotation radii of 225 barred galaxies, using IFU data from MaNGA and the Tremaine-Weinberg method. Our sample, which is divided between strongly and weakly barred galaxies identified via Galaxy Zoo, is the largest that this method has been applied to. We find lower pattern speeds for strongly barred galaxies than for weakly barred galaxies. As simulations show that the pattern speed decreases as the bar exchanges angular momentum with its host, these results suggest that strong bars are more evolved than weak bars. Interestingly, the corotation radius is not different between weakly and strongly barred galaxies, despite being proportional to bar length. We also find that the corotation radius is significantly different between quenching and star forming galaxies. Additionally, we find that strongly barred galaxies have significantly lower values for $\mathcal {R}$, the ratio between the corotation radius and the bar radius, than weakly barred galaxies, despite a big overlap in both distributions. This ratio classifies bars into ultrafast bars ($\mathcal {R} <$ 1.0; 11% of our sample), fast bars (1.0 $< \mathcal {R} <$ 1.4; 27%) and slow bars ($\mathcal {R} >$ 1.4; 62%). Simulations show that $\mathcal {R}$ is correlated with the bar formation mechanism, so our results suggest that strong bars are more likely to be formed by different mechanisms than weak bars. Finally, we find a lower fraction of ultrafast bars than most other studies, which decreases the recently claimed tension with ΛCDM. However, the median value of $\mathcal {R}$ is still lower than what is predicted by simulations.