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Bars in disk-dominated galaxies are able to drive gas inflow inside the corotation radius, thus enhancing the central star formation rate (SFR). Previous work, however, has found that disk-dominated galaxies with centrally suppressed SFRs frequently host a bar. Here we investigate possible causes for the suppression of central SFRs in such cases. We compare the physical properties of a sample of disk-dominated barred galaxies with high central SFRs (HC galaxies) with those of a sample of disk-dominated barred galaxies with low central SFRs (LC galaxies). We find that the two samples have, on average, similar H i content and bars of similar strength. But we also find that the HCs have bluer colors than the LCs, and that outside the bar region, they host stronger spiral arms than the LCs, where closed rings are more often seen. We discuss and evaluate the possible causes for the suppression of the central SFR in the LC galaxies as opposed to its enhancement in the HC galaxies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bars in galaxies may form not only through instability but also as a result of an interaction with another galaxy. In particular, they may appear in disky dwarf galaxies interacting with Milky Way–like galaxies. Here we report the results of Nbody/SPH simulations of such dwarfs orbiting in the static potential of a larger galaxy. We used several models of the dwarf galaxy, all of the same mass but covering a large range of gas fractions: 0%, 30%, and 70%. We also tested the impact of subgrid star formation processes. In all cases, bars of similar length formed in the stellar disk of the dwarfs at the first pericenter passage. However, unexpectedly, the gaseous component remained approximately axisymmetric and unaffected by the bar potential. The bar properties did not change significantly between two consecutive pericenters. The impact of the later encounters with the host depends strongly on the exact orientation of the bar at the pericenter. When the bar is spun up by the tidal force torque, it is also shortened. Conversely, if it is slowed down, it gets longer. In the models with a low gas fraction, the bars were more pronounced and survived until the end of the simulations, while in the dwarfs with a high gas fraction, the bars were destroyed after the second or third pericenter passage. In terms of the ratio of the corotation radius to the bar length, the bars are slow, and remain so independently of the encounters with the host. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a hydrodynamical model of M33 and its recent interaction with M31. This scenario was previously proposed in the literature in order to explain the distorted gaseous and stellar disks of M33, as well as the increased star formation rate in both objects around 2 Gyr ago. We used an orbit integration scheme to find which estimate of the transverse velocity of M31 favors the interaction scenario more and then tried to reproduce it in our simulations. M33 was modeled as a stellar and gaseous disk embedded in a live dark matter halo, while M31 was approximated only with a live dark halo. In the simulations, the two galaxies passed each other with a pericenter distance of 37 kpc. Tides excited a two-armed spiral structure in the M33 disk, which is found to be the predominant spiral signal in the observed galaxy and has long been known as a feature easily induced by tidal interactions. We found that the gaseous warp produced by the interaction did not resemble enough the observed one, and we performed an additional simulation including the hot gas halo of M31 to show that this feature can be properly reproduced by tidal forces and ram pressure stripping acting simultaneously on the gaseous disk. In addition to the spiral arms, tidal forces produced a stellar stream similar to the one observed and triggered a star formation burst at radii similar to where it is observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bars in galaxies may develop through a global instability or as a result of an interaction with another system. We study bar formation in disky dwarf galaxies orbiting a Milky Way-like galaxy. We employ N-body simulations to study the impact of the initial orbital parameters: the size of the dwarf galaxy orbit, and the inclination of its disk with respect to the orbital plane. In all cases, a bar develops in the center of the dwarf during the first pericenter on its orbit around the host. Between subsequent pericenter passages, the bars are stable, but at the pericenters, they are usually weakened and shortened. The initial properties and details of the further evolution of the bars depend heavily on the orbital configuration. We find that for the exactly prograde orientation, the strongest bar is formed for the intermediate-sized orbit. On the tighter orbit, the disk is too disturbed and stripped to form a strong bar. On the wider orbit, the tidal interaction is too weak. The dependence on the disk inclination is such that weaker bars form in more inclined disks. The bars experience either a very weak buckling or none at all. We do not observe any secular evolution, possibly because the dwarfs are perturbed at each pericenter passage. The rotation speed of the bars can be classified as slow (RCR/lbar ∼ 2–3). We attribute this to the loss of a significant fraction of the disk rotation during the encounter with the host galaxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orbits are the key building blocks of any density distribution, and their study helps us understand the kinematical structure and the evolution of galaxies. Here, we investigate orbits in a tidally induced bar of a dwarf galaxy, using an N-body simulation of an initially disky dwarf galaxy orbiting a Milky Way-like host. After the first pericenter passage, a tidally induced bar forms in the stellar component of the dwarf. The bar evolution is different than in isolated galaxies and our analysis focuses on the period before it buckles. We study the orbits in terms of their dominant frequencies, which we calculate in a Cartesian coordinate frame rotating with the bar. Apart from the well-known x1 orbits, we find many other types, mostly with boxy shapes of various degree of elongation. Some of them are also near-periodic, admitting frequency ratios of 4/3, 3/2, and 5/3. The box orbits have various degrees of vertical thickness but only a relatively small fraction of those have banana (i.e., smile/frown) or infinity-symbol shapes in the edge-on view. In the very center we also find orbits known from the potential of triaxial ellipsoids. The elongation of the orbits grows with distance from the center of the bar in agreement with the variation of the shape of the density distribution. Our classification of orbits leads to the conclusion that more than 80% of them have boxy shapes, while only 8% have shapes of classical x1 orbits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magellanic spiral galaxies are a class of one-armed systems that often exhibit an offset stellar bar and are rarely found around massive spiral galaxies. Using a set of N-body and hydrodynamic simulations, we consider a dwarf–dwarf galaxy interaction as the driving mechanism for the formation of this peculiar class of systems. We investigate here the relation between the dynamical, stellar, and gaseous disk center and the bar. In all our simulations the bar center always coincides with the dynamical center, while the stellar disk becomes highly asymmetric during the encounter, causing the photometric center of the Magellanic galaxy disk to become mismatched with both the bar and the dynamical center. The disk asymmetries persist for almost 2 Gyr, the time that it takes for the disk to be recentered with the bar, and well after the companion has passed. This explains the nature of the offset bar found in many Magellanic-type galaxies, including the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and NGC 3906. In particular, these results, once applied to the LMC, suggest that the dynamical center should reside in the bar center instead of the H i center as previously assumed, pointing to a variation in the current estimate of the north component of the LMC proper motion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using N-body simulations, we study the formation and evolution of tidally induced bars in disky galaxies in clusters. Our progenitor is a massive, late-type galaxy similar to the Milky Way, composed of an exponential disk and a Navarro-Frenk-White dark matter halo. We place the galaxy on four different orbits in a Virgo-like cluster and evolve it for 10 Gyr. As a reference case, we also evolve the same model in isolation. Tidally induced bars form on all orbits soon after the first pericenter passage and survive until the end of the evolution. They appear earlier, are stronger and longer, and have lower pattern speeds for tighter orbits. Only for the tightest orbit are the properties of the bar controlled by the orientation of the tidal torque from the cluster at pericenter. The mechanism behind the formation of the bars is the angular momentum transfer from the galaxy stellar component to its halo. All of the bars undergo extended periods of buckling instability that occur earlier and lead to more pronounced boxy/peanut shapes when the tidal forces are stronger. Using all simulation outputs of galaxies at different evolutionary stages, we construct a toy model of the galaxy population in the cluster and measure the average bar strength and bar fraction as a function of clustercentric radius. Both are found to be mildly decreasing functions of radius. We conclude that tidal forces can trigger bar formation in cluster cores, but not in the outskirts, and thus can cause larger concentrations of barred galaxies toward the cluster center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using three fiducial N-body+SPH simulations, we follow the merging of two disk galaxies that each have a hot gaseous halo component, and examine whether the merger remnant can be a spiral galaxy. The stellar progenitor disks are destroyed by violent relaxation during the merging and most of their stars form a classical bulge, while the remaining stars, as well as stars born during the merging times, form a thick disk and its bar. A new stellar disk forms subsequently and gradually in the remnant from the gas accreted mainly from the halo. It is vertically thin and well extended in its equatorial plane. A bar starts forming before the disk is fully in place, which is contrary to what is assumed in idealized simulations of isolated bar-forming galaxies, and has morphological features such as ansae and boxy/peanut bulges. Stars of different ages populate different parts of the box/peanut. A disky pseudobulge also forms, so that by the end of the simulation all three types of bulges coexist. The oldest stars are found in the classical bulge, followed by those of the thick disk, then by those in the thin disk. The youngest stars are in the spiral arms and the disky pseudobulge. The disk surface density profiles are of type II (exponential with downbending); the circular velocity curves are flat and show that the disks are submaximum in these examples: two clearly so and one near-borderline between maximum and submaximum. On average, only roughly between 10% and 20% of the stellar mass is in the classical bulge of the final models, i.e., much less than in previous simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the stellar kinematics across the Galactic bulge and into the disk at positive longitudes from the SDSS-III APOGEE spectroscopic survey of the Milky Way. APOGEE includes extensive coverage of the stellar populations of the bulge along the midplane and near-plane regions. From these data, we have produced kinematic maps of 10,000 stars across longitudes of 0° < l < 65°, and primarily across latitudes of < 5° in the bulge region. The APOGEE data reveal that the bulge is cylindrically rotating across all latitudes and is kinematically hottest at the very center of the bulge, with the smallest gradients in both kinematic and chemical space inside the innermost region < (5°, 5°). The results from APOGEE show good agreement with data from other surveys at higher latitudes and a remarkable similarity to the rotation and dispersion maps of barred galaxies viewed edge-on. The thin bar that is reported to be present in the inner disk within a narrow latitude range of < 2° appears to have a corresponding signature in and . Stars with > −0.5 have dispersion and rotation profiles that are similar to that of N-body models of boxy/peanut bulges. There is a smooth kinematic transition from the thin bar and boxy bulge < (15°, 12°) out to the disk for stars with > −1.0, and the chemodynamics across (l, b) suggests that the stars in the inner Galaxy with > −1.0 originate in the disk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "The Impact of Bars on Disk Breaks as Probed by S4G Imaging" published in the February 2016 issue is presented.

Using 3.6 and 4.5 μm images of 73 late-type, edge-on galaxies from the S4G survey, we compare the richness of the globular cluster populations of these galaxies to those of early-type galaxies that we measured previously. In general, the galaxies presented here fill in the distribution for galaxies with lower stellar mass, M*, specifically , overlap the results for early-type galaxies of similar masses, and, by doing so, strengthen the case for a dependence of the number of globular clusters per 109M⊙ of galaxy stellar mass, TN, on M*. For we find the relationship can be satisfactorily described as when M* is expressed in solar masses. The functional form of the relationship is only weakly constrained, and extrapolation outside this range is not advised. Our late-type galaxies, in contrast to our early types, do not show the tendency for low-mass galaxies to split into two TN families. Using these results and a galaxy stellar mass function from the literature, we calculate that, in a volume-limited, local universe sample, clusters are most likely to be found around fairly massive galaxies (M* ∼ 1010.8M⊙) and present a fitting function for the volume number density of clusters as a function of parent-galaxy stellar mass. We find no correlation between TN and large-scale environment, but we do find a tendency for galaxies of fixed M* to have larger TN if they have converted a larger proportion of their baryons into stars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use mid-infrared 3.6 and 4.5 μm imaging of NGC 3906 from the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G) to understand the nature of an unusual offset between its stellar bar and the photometric center of an otherwise regular, circular outer stellar disk. We measure an offset of ∼910 pc between the center of the stellar bar and photometric center of the stellar disk; the bar center coincides with the kinematic center of the disk determined from previous HI observations. Although the undisturbed shape of the disk suggests that NGC 3906 has not undergone a significant merger event in its recent history, the most plausible explanation for the observed offset is an interaction. Given the relatively isolated nature of NGC 3906 this interaction could be with dark matter substructure in the galaxy's halo or from a recent interaction with a fast moving neighbor that remains to be identified. Simulations aimed at reproducing the observed offset between the stellar bar/kinematic center of the system and the photometric center of the disk are necessary to confirm this hypothesis and constrain the interaction history of the galaxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selecting centrally quiescent galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to create high signal-to-noise ratio ( Å−1) stacked spectra with minimal emission-line contamination, we accurately and precisely model the central stellar populations of barred and unbarred quiescent disk galaxies. By splitting our sample by redshift, we can use the fixed size of the SDSS fiber to model the stellar populations at different radii within galaxies. At , the SDSS fiber radius corresponds to ≈1 kpc, which is the typical half-light radii of both classical bulges and disky pseudobulges. Assuming that the SDSS fiber primarily covers the bulges at these redshifts, our analysis shows that there are no significant differences in the stellar populations, i.e., stellar age, [Fe/H], [Mg/Fe], and [N/Fe], of the bulges of barred versus unbarred quiescent disk galaxies. Modeling the stellar populations at different redshift intervals from z = 0.020 to z = 0.085 at fixed stellar masses produces an estimate of the stellar population gradients out to about half the typical effective radius of our sample, assuming null evolution over this ≈1 Gyr epoch. We find that there are no noticeable differences in the slopes of the azimuthally averaged gradients of barred versus unbarred quiescent disk galaxies. These results suggest that bars are not a strong influence on the chemical evolution of quiescent disk galaxies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]