The Environment of Barred Galaxies Revisited

Abstract

We present a study of the environment of barred galaxies using galaxies drawn from the SDSS. We use several different statistics to quantify the environment: the projected two-point cross-correlation function, the background-subtracted number counts of neighbor galaxies, the overdensity of the local environment, the membership of our galaxies to galaxy groups to segregate central and satellite systems, and, for central galaxies, the stellar to halo mass ratio (M_∗∕M_h). When we split our sample into early- and late-type galaxies, we see a weak but significant trend for early-type galaxies with a bar to be more strongly clustered on scales from a few 100 kpc to 1 Mpc when compared to unbarred early-type galaxies. This indicates that the presence of a bar in early-type galaxies depends on the location within their host dark matter halos. This is confirmed by the group catalog in the sense that for early-types, the fraction of central galaxies is smaller if they have a bar. For late-type galaxies, we find fewer neighbors within $\sim$ 50 kpc around the barred galaxies when compared to unbarred galaxies from the control sample, suggesting that tidal forces from close companions suppress the formation/growth of bars. For central late-type galaxies, bars are more common on galaxies with high M_∗∕M_h values, as expected from early theoretical works which showed that systems with massive dark matter halos are more stable against bar instabilities. Finally, we find no obvious correlation between overdensity and the bars in our sample, showing that galactic bars are not obviously linked to the large-scale structure of the universe.