On the morphology of dust lanes in galactic bars

Abstract

The aim of our study is to use dynamical simulations to explore the influence of two important dynamical bar parameters, bar strength and bar pattern speed, on the shape of the bar dust lanes. To quantify the shape of the dust lanes we have developed a new systematic method to measure the dust lane curvature. Previous numerical simulations have compared the curvature of bar dust lanes with the bar strength, predicting a relation between both parameters which has been supported by observational studies but with a large spread. We take into account the bar pattern speed to explore, simultaneously, the effect of both parameters on the dust lane shape. To that end, we separate our galactic bars in fast bars $\left(1<\mathcal{R}<1.4\right)$ and slow bars $\left(\mathcal{R}>1.4\right)$, obtaining, as previous simulations, an inverse relation between the dust lane curvature and the bar strength for fast bars. For the first time, we extend the study to slow bars, finding a constant curvature as a function of the bar strength. As a result, we conclude that weak bars with straight dust lanes are candidates for slow bars. Finally, we have analysed a pilot sample of ten S${}^4$G galaxies, obtaining dust lane curvatures lying within the range covered by the simulations.

7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS 2015 April 7

References in corpus (8)

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• Arm-interarm gas abundance variations explored with MUSE: the role of spiral structure in the chemical enrichment of galaxies
• Constraining the dark matter content of NGC 1291 using hydrodynamic gas response simulations
• Bar Classification based on the Potential Map
• Hydrodynamical Simulations of Nuclear Rings in Barred Galaxies