Do Low Surface Brightness galaxies host stellar bars?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether low surface brightness galaxies host stellar bars and how bar occurrence relates to surface brightness, revealing lower bar fractions and shorter bars in low surface brightness galaxies, influenced by spin and gas content.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis linking surface brightness with stellar bar presence and properties, highlighting the roles of galaxy spin and gas richness.

Findings

Low surface brightness galaxies have fewer strong bars.

Bar length correlates negatively with surface brightness.

Bar properties are influenced by galaxy spin and gas content.

Abstract

With the aim of assessing if low surface brightness galaxies host stellar bars, and study the dependence of the occurrence of bars as a function of surface brightness, we use the Galaxy Zoo 2 dataset to construct a large volume-limited sample of galaxies, and segregate the galaxies as low and high surface brightness in terms of their central surface brightness. We find that the fraction of low surface brightness galaxies hosting strong bars is systematically lower than the one found for high surface brightness galaxies. The dependence of the bar fraction on the central surface brightness is mostly driven by a correlation of the surface brightness with the spin and the gas-richness of the galaxies, showing only a minor dependence on the surface brightness. We also find that the length of the bars shows a strong dependence on the surface brightness, and although some of this dependence is attributed to the gas content, even at fixed gas-to-stellar mass ratio, high surface brightness galaxies host longer bars than their low surface brightness counterparts, which we attribute to an anticorrelation of the surface brightness with the spin.