English

Stellar mass distribution of S$^4$G disk galaxies and signatures of bar-induced secular evolution

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2016-12-07 v2

Abstract

We use 3.6 μ\mum photometry from the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4^{4}G) to trace the stellar distribution in nearby disk galaxies (z0z\approx0) with total stellar masses 108.5M/M101110^{8.5}\lesssim M_{\ast}/M_{\odot}\lesssim10^{11} and mid-IR Hubble types 3T10-3 \le T \le 10, and to provide observational constraints for galaxy formation models to be checked against. For 1154 galaxies with disk inclinations lower than 6565^{\circ}, we Fourier decompose and rescale their images to a common frame determined (i) by the size in physical units, (ii) by their disk scalelength, and for 748 barred galaxies (iii) by both the length and orientation of their bars. We stack the resized density profiles and images to obtain statistically representative average stellar disks and bars in bins of MM_{\ast} and TT. We also calculate the mean stellar contribution to the circular velocity. We infer the gravitational potentials from the synthetic bars to obtain the tangential-to-radial force ratio (QTQ_{\rm T}) and A2A_2 profiles in the different bins. We provide observational evidence for bar-induced secular evolution of disk galaxies. For M109MM_{\ast} \ge 10^{9}M_{\odot}, we find a significant difference in the stellar density profiles of barred and non-barred systems: (i) disks in barred galaxies show larger scalelengths (hRh_{\rm R}) and fainter extrapolated central surface brightnesses (Σ0\Sigma_{0}), (ii) the mean surface brightness profiles (Σ\Sigma_{\ast}) of barred and non-barred galaxies intersect each other slightly beyond the mean bar length, most likely at the bar corotation, and (iii) the central mass concentration of barred galaxies is larger (by almost a factor 2 when T5T\le5) than in their non-barred counterparts. We also show that bars hosted by early-type galaxies are more centrally concentrated and have larger density amplitudes than their late-type counterparts (Abridged).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.07317,
  title  = {Stellar mass distribution of S$^4$G disk galaxies and signatures of bar-induced secular evolution},
  author = {Simón Díaz-García and Heikki Salo and Eija Laurikainen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.07317},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

22 pages, 19 figures, accepted for publication in A&A (July 24, 2016)