Barred Galaxies: an Observer's Perspective

Abstract

I review both well established and more recent findings on the properties of bars, and their host galaxies, stemming from photometric and spectroscopic observations, and discuss how these findings can be understood in terms of a global picture of the formation and evolution of bars, keeping a connection with theoretical developments. In particular, I show the results of a detailed structural analysis of ~ 300 barred galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, providing physical quantities, such as bar length, ellipticity and boxyness, and bar-to-total luminosity ratio, that can either be used as a solid basis on which realistic models can be built, or be compared against more fundamental theoretical results. I also show correlations that indicate that bars grow longer, thinner and stronger with dynamical age, and that the growth of bars and bulges is connected. Finally, I briefly discuss open questions and possible directions for future research.

13 pages, 4 figures; invited review to be published in "Chaos in Astronomy", G. Contopoulos, P.A. Patsis (eds.)

References in corpus (2)

• Evolution of the Bar Fraction in COSMOS: Quantifying the Assembly of the Hubble Sequence
• Barred Galaxies: an Observer's Perspective

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Secular Evolution and Structural Properties of Stellar Bars in Galaxies
• Time Inference with MUSE in Extragalactic Rings (TIMER): Properties of the Survey and High-Level Data Products
• Rings and spirals in barred galaxies. III. Further comparisons and links to observations
• Supernovae and their host galaxies - III. The impact of bars and bulges on the radial distribution of supernovae in disc galaxies
• Barred Galaxies: an Observer's Perspective