Automated bar detection in local disk galaxies from the SDSS

The colors of bars^⋆

Dipartimento di Fisica G. Occhialini, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza 3, 20126 Milano, Italy
e-mail: guido.consolandi@mib.infn.it

Received: 14 June 2016
Accepted: 14 July 2016

Abstract

This paper describes an automatic isophotal fitting procedure that succeeds, without the support of any visual inspection of either the images or the ellipticity/position-angle radial profiles, to extract a fairly pure sample of barred late-type galaxies (LTGs) among thousands of optical images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The procedure relies on previous methods to robustly extract the photometrical properties of a large sample of local SDSS galaxies and is tailored to extract bars on the basis of their well-known peculiarities in their position angle and ellipticity profiles. This procedure was run on a sample of 5853 galaxies in the Coma and Local superclusters. The procedure extracted a color, an ellipticity and a position angle radial profile of the ellipses fitted to the isophotes for each galaxy. Examining the profiles of 922 face-on LTGs (B/A > 0.7) automatically, the procedure found that ~36% are barred. The local bar fraction strongly increases with stellar mass. The sample of barred galaxies is used to construct a set of template radial color profiles to test the impact of the barred galaxy population on the average color profiles as previously shown in the literature and to test the bar-quenching scenario. The radial color profile of barred galaxy shows that bars are on average redder than their surrounding disk producing an outside-in gradient toward red in correspondence with their corotation radius. The distribution of the extension of the deprojected length of the bar suggests that bars have strong impact on the gradients of averaged color profiles. The dependence of the profiles on the mass is consistent with the bar-quenching scenario, i.e. more massive barred galaxies have redder colors (hence older stellar population and suppressed star formation) inside their corotation radius with respect to their lower mass counterparts.