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Published November 2020 | Accepted Version + Published
Journal Article Open

Kinematic signatures of nuclear discs and bar-driven secular evolution in nearby galaxies of the MUSE TIMER project

Abstract

The central regions of disc galaxies hold clues to the processes that dominate their formation and evolution. To exploit this, the TIMER project has obtained high signal-to-noise and spatial resolution integral-field spectroscopy data of the inner few kpc of 21 nearby massive barred galaxies, which allows studies of the stellar kinematics in their central regions with unprecedented spatial resolution. We confirm theoretical predictions of the effects of bars on stellar kinematics and identify box/peanuts through kinematic signatures in mildly and moderately inclined galaxies, finding a lower limit to the fraction of massive barred galaxies with box/peanuts at ∼62%. Further, we provide kinematic evidence of the connection between barlenses, box/peanuts, and bars. We establish the presence of nuclear discs in 19 galaxies and show that their kinematics are characterised by near-circular orbits with low pressure support and that they are fully consistent with the bar-driven secular evolution picture for their formation. In fact, we show that these nuclear discs have, in the region where they dominate, larger rotational support than the underlying main galaxy disc. In addition, we define a kinematic radius for the nuclear discs and show that it relates to bar radius, ellipticity and strength, and bar-to-total ratio. Comparing our results with photometric studies of galaxy bulges, we find that careful, state-of-the-art galaxy image decompositions are generally able to discern nuclear discs from classical bulges if the images employed have high enough physical spatial resolution. In fact, we show that nuclear discs are typically identified in such image decompositions as photometric bulges with (near-)exponential profiles. However, we find that the presence of composite bulges (galaxies hosting both a classical bulge and a nuclear disc) can often be unnoticed in studies based on photometry alone and suggest a more stringent threshold to the Sérsic index to identify galaxies with pure classical bulges.

Additional Information

© 2020 ESO. Article published by EDP Sciences. Received 19 May 2020; Accepted 24 August 2020; Published online 27 October 2020. We thank the anonymous referee for timely and helpful reports. Based on observations collected at the European Southern Observatory under ESO programmes 097.B-0640(A), 095.B-0532(A), 094.B-0321(A) and 060.A-9313(A). J. F-B, AdLC, and PSB acknowledge support through the RAVET project by the grants AYA2016-77237-C3-1-P, AYA2016-77237-C3-2-P and PID2019-107427GB-C31 from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MCIU). J.F.-B. and AdLC acknowledge support through the IAC project TRACES which is partially supported through the state budget and the regional budget of the Consejería de Economía, Industria, Comercio y Conocimiento of the Canary Islands Autonomous Community. JMA acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) by grant AYA2017-83204-P. TK was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (No. 2019R1A6A3A01092024). The Science, Technology and Facilities Council is acknowledged by JN for support through the Consolidated Grant Cosmology and Astrophysics at Portsmouth, ST/S000550/1. GvdV acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 724857 (Consolidator Grant ArcheoDyn). This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services. We acknowledge the usage of the HyperLeda database (http://leda.univ-lyon1.fr). This research has also made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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Published - aa38448-20.pdf

Accepted Version - 2009.01852.pdf

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Created:
August 20, 2023
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