Both fuelling of a central black hole and the build-up of bulges are -- at least theoretically -- facilitated by non-axisymmetric potentials. It is argued here that the recently established surface brightness division between bulge-dominated galaxies that dominate the local type 2 AGN luminosity function, and disk-dominated galaxies that host (at best) weak AGN can be understood in terms of a simple bar-instability criterion.
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0408198,
title = {On Bars, Bulges and Fuelling of Active Galactic Nuclei},
author = {Rosemary F. G. Wyse},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0408198},
year = {2009}
}