Papers › What Determines the Sizes of Bars in Spiral Galaxies?
What Determines the Sizes of Bars in Spiral Galaxies?
Peter Erwin
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
I use volume- and mass-limited subsamples and recently published data from the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G) to investigate how the size of bars depends on galaxy properties. The known correlation between bar semi-major-axis a and galaxy stellar mass (or luminosity) is actually *bimodal*: for logM_⋆ < 10.1, bar size is almost independent of stellar mass (a ∝M_⋆^(0.1)), while it is a strong function for higher masses (a ∝M_⋆^(0.6)). Bar size is a slightly stronger function of galaxy half-light radius rₑ and (especially) exponential disc scale length h (a ∝h^(0.8)). Correlations between stellar mass and galaxy size can explain the bar-size--M_⋆ correlation -- but only for galaxies with logM_⋆ < 10.1; at higher masses, there is an extra dependence of bar size on M_⋆ itself. Despite theoretical arguments that the presence of gas can affect bar growth, there is no evidence for any residual dependence of bar size on (present-day) gas mass fraction. The traditional dependence of bar size on Hubble type (longer bars in early-type discs) can be explained as a side-effect of stellar-mass--Hubble-type correlations. Finally, I show that galaxy size (rₑ or h) can be modeled as a function of stellar mass and both bar presence and bar size: barred galaxies tend to be more extended than unbarred galaxies of the same mass, with larger bars correlated with larger sizes.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections