Significance of bar quenching in the global quenching of star formation

¹ Department of Physics, Christ University, Bangalore, India
e-mail: koshyastro@gmail.com
² Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Koramangala II Block, Bangalore, India

Received: 5 February 2019
Accepted: 4 July 2019

Abstract

The suppression of star formation in the inner kiloparsec regions of barred disk galaxies due to the action of bars is known as bar quenching. We investigate here the significance of bar quenching in the global quenching of star formation in the barred galaxies and their transformation to passive galaxies in the local Universe. We do this by measuring the offset of quenched barred galaxies from star-forming main sequence galaxies in the star formation rate-stellar mass plane and comparing it with the length of the bar, which is considered as a proxy of bar quenching. We constructed the star formation rate-stellar mass plane of 2885 local Universe face-on strong barred disk galaxies (z <  0.06) identified by Galaxy Zoo. The barred disk galaxies studied here fall on the star formation main sequence relation with a significant scatter for galaxies above stellar mass 10^10.2M_⊙. We found that 34.97% galaxies are within the intrinsic scatter (0.3 dex) of the main sequence relation, with a starburst population of 10.78% (above the 0.3 dex) and a quenched population of 54.25% (below the −0.3 dex) of the total barred disk galaxies in our sample. Significant neutral hydrogen (M_HI > 10⁹M_⊙ with log M_HI/M_⋆ ∼ −1.0 to −0.5) is detected in the quenched barred galaxies with a similar gas content to that of the star-forming barred galaxies. We found that the offset of the quenched barred galaxies from the main sequence relation is not dependent on the length of the stellar bar. This implies that the bar quenching may not contribute significantly to the global quenching of star formation in barred galaxies. However, this observed result could also be due to other factors such as the dissolution of bars over time after star formation quenching, the effect of other quenching processes acting simultaneously, and/or the effects of environment.