ESTABLISHING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN PEANUT-SHAPED BULGES AND GALACTIC BARS
Abstract
It has been suggested that the peanut-shaped bulges seen in some edge-on disk galaxies are due to the presence of a central bar. Although bars cannot be detected photometrically in edge-on galaxies, we show that barred potentials produce a strong kinematic signature in the form of double-peaked line-of-sight velocity distributions with a characteristic ``figure-of-eight'' variation with radius. We have obtained spectroscopic observations of two edge-on galaxies with peanut-shaped bulges (NGC~5746 and NGC~5965), and they reveal exactly such line-of-sight velocity distributions in both their gaseous (emission line) and their stellar (absorption line) components. These observations provide strong observational evidence that peanut-shaped bulges are a by-product of bar formation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9501114,
title = {ESTABLISHING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN PEANUT-SHAPED BULGES AND GALACTIC BARS},
author = {Konrad Kuijken and Michael R. Merrifield},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9501114},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
Plain TeX (8 p) + 3 postscript figures. uuencoded, gzipped tar file. (420MB). Accepted for ApJLett.