Do bulges stop stars forming?
Stephen Eales, Oliver Eales, Pieter de Vis
TL;DR
This study investigates whether bulges suppress star formation in galaxies, finding that while bulges may contribute to reduced star-formation efficiency, other processes also play significant roles.
Contribution
It provides observational evidence that bulges can reduce star-formation efficiency but are not the sole factor, highlighting the complexity of galaxy evolution.
Findings
Galaxies with prominent bulges have lower star-formation efficiencies.
A strong correlation exists between star-formation efficiency and specific star-formation rate in non-bulge galaxies.
Galaxies with bars show slightly higher star-formation efficiencies.
Abstract
In this paper, we use the Herschel Reference Survey to make a direct test of the hypothesis that the growth of a stellar bulge leads to a reduction in the star-formation efficiency of a galaxy (or conversely a growth in the gas-depletion timescale) as a result of the stabilisation of the gaseous disk by the gravitational field of the bulge. We find a strong correlation between star-formation efficiency and specific star-formation rate in galaxies without prominent bulges and in galaxies of the same morphological type, showing that there must be some other process besides the growth of a bulge that reduces the star-formation efficiency in galaxies. However, we also find that galaxies with more prominent bulges (Hubble types E to Sab) do have significantly lower star-formation efficiencies than galaxies with later morphological types, which is at least consistent with the hypothesis that…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.