Do galactic bars depend on environment?: An information theoretic analysis of Galaxy Zoo 2

TL;DR

This study employs an information theoretic approach to analyze Galaxy Zoo 2 data, finding no significant correlation between galaxy bars and environment, suggesting internal galaxy processes primarily determine barredness.

Contribution

It introduces an information theoretic framework to assess the environmental dependence of galactic bars using mutual information and statistical tests.

Findings

Mutual information between barredness and environment is not statistically significant.

Randomization and shuffling do not alter mutual information significantly.

Environment has minimal influence on bar formation, which is mainly driven by internal processes.

Abstract

We use an information theoretic framework to analyze data from the Galaxy Zoo 2 project and study if there are any statistically significant correlations between the presence of bars in spiral galaxies and their environment. We measure the mutual information between the barredness of galaxies and their environments in a volume limited sample ($M_r \leq -21$) and compare it with the same in datasets where (i) the bar/unbar classifications are randomized and (ii) the spatial distribution of galaxies are shuffled on different length scales. We assess the statistical significance of the differences in the mutual information using a t-test and find that both randomization of morphological classifications and shuffling of spatial distribution do not alter the mutual information in a statistically significant way. The non-zero mutual information between barredness and environment arises due to the finite and discrete nature of the dataset which can be entirely explained by mock Poisson distributions. We also separately compare the cumulative distribution functions of the barred and unbarred galaxies as a function of their local density. Using a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, we find that the null hypothesis can not be rejected even at $75\%$ confidence level. Our analysis indicates that environments do not play a significant role in the formation of a bar, which is largely determined by the internal processes of the host galaxy.