James, PA and Percival, SM (2016) Stellar population constraints on the ages of galactic bars. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 457 (1). pp. 917-925. ISSN 0035-8711

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Abstract

© 2016 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. We present a study of the stellar populations within the central regions of four nearby barred galaxies, and use a novel technique to constrain the duration of bar activity. We focus on the star formation 'desert', a region within each of these galaxies where star formation appears to have been suppressed by the bar. New Hß spectroscopic data are presented, and used to produce spectroscopic line indices which are compared with theoretical predictions from population synthesis models for simple stellar populations and temporally truncated star formation histories. This analysis shows that the dearth of star formation activity in these regions appears to have been continuing for at least 1 Gyr, with time-scales of several Gyr indicated for two of the galaxies. This favours models in which strong bars can be long-lived features of galaxies, but our results also indicate a significant diversity in stellar population ages, and hence in the implied histories of bar activity in these four galaxies.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ©: 2016 P.A. James & S.M. Percival. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	0201 Astronomical And Space Sciences
Subjects:	Q Science > QB Astronomy
Divisions:	Astrophysics Research Institute
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Date Deposited:	15 Apr 2016 09:03
Last Modified:	04 Sep 2021 13:02
DOI or ID number:	10.1093/mnras/stv2978
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/3434

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