Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS
Volume 706, Issue 2, Pages L256-L259Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/706/2/L256
Keywords
galaxies: kinematics and dynamics; galaxies: spiral
Categories
Funding
- Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia [AYA 2004-08251-CO2-01, AYA 2007-CO2-01]
- Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias [P3/86, 3I2407]
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Participating Institutions
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Japanese Monbukagakusho
- Max Planck Society
- Higher Education Funding Council for England
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We test the theoretical prediction that the straightest dust lanes in bars are found in strongly barred galaxies, or more specifically, that the degree of curvature of the dust lanes is inversely proportional to the strength of the bar. The test uses archival images of barred galaxies for which a reliable nonaxisymmetric torque parameter (Q(b)) and the radius at which Q(b) has been measured (r(Q(b))) have been published in the literature. Our results confirm the theoretical prediction but show a large spread that cannot be accounted for by measurement errors. We simulate 238 galaxies with different bar and bulge parameters in order to investigate the origin of the spread in the dust lane curvature versus Q(b) relation. From these simulations, we conclude that the spread is greatly reduced when describing the bar strength as a linear combination of the bar parameters Q(b) and the quotient of the major and minor axes of the bar, a/b. Thus, we conclude that the dust lane curvature is predominantly determined by the parameters of the bar.
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