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Observational evidence for bar formation in disk galaxies via cluster–cluster interaction

Nature Astronomy volume 3, pages 844–850 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Bars are elongated structures that extend from the centre of galaxies, and about one-third of disk galaxies are known to possess bars1,2,3. These bars are thought to form either through a physical process inherent in galaxies4,5,6, or through an external process such as galaxy–galaxy interactions7,8,9. However, there are other plausible mechanisms of bar formation that still need to be observationally tested. Here we present the observational evidence that bars can form via cluster–cluster interaction10. We examined 105 galaxy clusters at redshift 0.015 < z < 0.060 that are selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data, and identified 16 interacting clusters. We find that the barred disk-dominated galaxy fraction is about 1.5 times higher in interacting clusters than in clusters with no clear signs of ongoing interaction (42% versus 27%). Our result indicates that bars can form through a large-scale violent phenomenon, and cluster–cluster interaction should be considered an important mechanism of bar formation.

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Fig. 1: Examples of the surface number density of galaxies around clusters, and the velocity and spatial distributions for the cluster member galaxies.
Fig. 2: Images of barred and non-barred disk galaxies classified in this study.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)

Fig. 3: Barred galaxies are more abundant in interacting clusters.

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Data availability

The data used in this work can be downloaded from the public data archive of SDSS (http://skyserver.sdss.org) and MPA-JHU catalogue at the website of https://www.sdss.org/dr14/spectro/galaxy_mpajhu/. The other data used for the plots within this paper are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank W.-T. Kim and S. Kwak for helpful comments and discussions. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea grant number 2017R1A3A3001362, funded by the Korea government. G.-H.L. was supported by the KASI-Arizona Joint Postdoctoral Fellowship Program jointly managed by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute and the Steward Observatory, at the University of Arizona.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for the Exploration of the Origin of the Universe, Astronomy Program, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Yongmin Yoon, Myungshin Im, Seong-Kook Lee & Gu Lim

  2. Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Gwang-Ho Lee

  3. Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

    Gwang-Ho Lee

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  1. Yongmin Yoon
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Contributions

Y.Y. led the analysis. Y.Y. and M.I. led the interpretation and wrote the paper. G.-H.L. and G.L. contributed to the classification of bar galaxies. G.-H.L. provided scientific input on the issues related to the morphology classification. S.-K.L. contributed to the cluster search. All authors contributed to the discussion of the results, reviewed the paper and provided input on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Myungshin Im.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–4, Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary references.

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Yoon, Y., Im, M., Lee, GH. et al. Observational evidence for bar formation in disk galaxies via cluster–cluster interaction. Nat Astron 3, 844–850 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0799-7

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