The environment of barred galaxies in the low-redshift Universe

Abstract

We present a study of the environment of barred galaxies using a volume-limited sample of over 30,000 galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We use four different statistics to quantify the environment: the projected two-point cross-correlation function, the background-subtracted number count of neighbor galaxies, the overdensity of the local environment, and the membership of our galaxies to galaxy groups to segregate central and satellite systems. For barred galaxies as a whole, we find a very weak difference in all the quantities compared to unbarred galaxies of the control sample. When we split our sample into early- and late-type galaxies, we see a weak but significant trend for early-type galaxies with a bar to be more strongly clustered on scales from a few 100 kpc to 1 Mpc when compared to unbarred early-type galaxies. This indicates that the presence of a bar in early-type galaxies depends on the location within their host dark matter halos. This is confirmed by the group catalog in the sense that for early-types, the fraction of central galaxies is smaller if they have a bar. For late-type galaxies, we find fewer neighbors within $\sim$50 kpc around the barred galaxies when compared to unbarred galaxies form the control sample, suggesting that tidal forces from close companions suppress the formation/growth of bars. Finally, we find no obvious correlation between overdensity and the bars in our sample, showing that galactic bars are not obviously linked to the large-scale structure of the universe.

11 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ; minor changes and references updated

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• A numerical study of interactions and stellar bars
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: The link between bars and the early cessation of star formation in spiral galaxies
• Stellar, gas and dark matter content of barred galaxies
• The Dependence of AGN Activity on Environment in SDSS
• Fate of stellar bars in minor merger of galaxies
• Observational evidence for bar formation in disk galaxies via cluster-cluster interaction
• More insights into bar quenching. Multi-wavelength analysis of four barred galaxies
• Dark matter halos of barred disk galaxies
• Morphology driven evolution of barred galaxies in OMEGAWINGS Clusters
• The Properties of Massive Star-forming galaxies with Outside-in Assembly Mode
• Unraveling Joint Evolution of Bars, Star Formation, and Active Galactic Nuclei of Disk Galaxies
• Bar properties and photometry of barred low surface brightness disc galaxies
• Properties of Barred Galaxies with the Environment: II. The case of the Cosmic Web around the Virgo cluster