Gaseous-phase metallicities and stellar populations in the centres of barred galaxies

© 2014 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. We received financial support through the Spanish research project AYA2010-21322-C03-03, from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. PSB is supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) through its Ramón y Cajal program. IP acknowledges the support by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) (via grants AYA2010-21322-C03-02, AYA2010-21322-C03-03, AYA2007-67625-C02-02 and Consolider-Ingenio CSD2010-00064) and by the Junta de Andalucía (FQM-108).
Numerical simulations predict that bars represent a very important agent for triggering gas inflows, which in turn could lead to central star formation. Bars thus are thought to contribute to the formation of the bulge. This process changes both the gaseous-phase and the stellar-phase metallicities in the centres of galaxies. With the aim of quantifying the importance of this process, we present a comparative study of the gaseous-phase and stellar-phase metallicities in the centres of members of a sample of barred and unbarred galaxies from SDSS. We do not find a significant difference in the metallicity (neither gaseous nor stellar) between barred and unbarred galaxies, but we find different trends in the metallicities of early- and late-type galaxies, with larger differences in the metallicity in the early-type subsample. Our results contradict some previous research in this field, but we find a possible origin of the discrepancies between previous works and our results.
Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO)
CONSOLIDER - INGENIO (MINECO)
Junta de Andalucía
Depto. de Física de la Tierra y Astrofísica
Fac. de Ciencias Físicas
TRUE
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