Fourier Photometric Analysis of Isolated Galaxies in the Context of the AMIGA Project

TL;DR

This study uses Fourier photometric decomposition to analyze the spiral and bar structures of approximately 100 isolated galaxies, revealing relationships between morphology, torque strength, and spiral arm multiplicity, and comparing these features with non-isolated galaxies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed Fourier analysis of isolated galaxies, highlighting the independence of bar and spiral strengths and comparing their properties with non-isolated galaxy samples.

Findings

Bars in earlier types are longer and higher contrast.

Longer bars are not necessarily stronger but have higher contrast.

Most common spiral arm multiplicity is two-armed (~40%).

Abstract

We present the results of a Fourier photometric decomposition of a representative sample of ~100 isolated Sb-Sc CIG/AMIGA galaxies. It complements the analysis presented in Durbala et al. 2008 for the same sample by allowing a description of the spiral structure morphology. We estimate dynamical measures like torque strength for bar and spiral, and also the total nonaxisymmetric torque. We explore the interplay between the spiral and bar components of galaxies. Both the length and the contrast of the Fourier bars decrease along the morphological sequence Sb-Sbc-Sc, with bars in earlier types being longer and showing higher contrast. Bars of Sb galaxies are ~3x longer than bars in Sc types. We find that longer bars are not necessarily stronger (as quantified by the torque Q_{b} measure), but longer bars show a higher contrast, in very good agreement with theoretical predictions. Our data suggests that bar and spiral components are rather independent in the sense that the torque strengths of the two components are not correlated. The total strength Q_{g} is a very reliable tracer of the bar strength Q_{b}, the two quantities showing a very tight linear correlation. Comparison with a similar sample of disk galaxies extracted from the OSUBGS indicates that the isolated CIG/AMIGA galaxies host significantly longer Fourier bars and possibly show a different distribution of spiral torque Q_{s}. The Fourier analysis also revealed a potential case of counterwinding spiral structure (NGC 5768), which deserves further kinematic study. We find that m = 2 (i.e., dominating two-armed pattern) is the most common spiral arm multiplicity among the sample of Sb-Sc CIG/AMIGA galaxies (~40%), m = 2&3 and m = 1&2 are found in ~28% and ~13% of isolated galaxies, respectively.