Barred Galaxies in the Coma Cluster
Authors: Irina Marinova (UT Austin), Shardha Jogee (UT Austin), Neil Trentham (Cambridge), Henry C. Ferguson (STScI), Tim Weinzirl (UT Austin), Marc Balcells (Tenerife), David Carter (Liverpool), Mark den Brok (Kapteyn), Peter Erwin (Max-Planck), Alister W. Graham (Swinburne), Paul Goudfrooij (STScI), Rafael Guzman (Florida), Derek Hammer (Johns Hopkins), Carlos Hoyos (Florida), Reynier F. Peletier (Kapteyn), Eric Peng (Peking University, Kavli Institute), Gijs Verdoes Kleijn (Kapteyn)
Abstract:
We use ACS data from the HST Treasury survey of the Coma cluster
(z~0.02) to study the properties of barred galaxies in the Coma core,
the densest environment in the nearby Universe. This study provides a
complementary data point for studies of barred galaxies as a function
of redshift and environment. From ~470 cluster members brighter than
MI = -11 mag, we select a sample of 46 disk galaxies (S0-Im) based
on visual classification. The sample is dominated by S0s for which we
find an optical bar fraction of 47±11% through ellipse fitting and
visual inspection. Among the bars in the core of the Coma cluster, we
do not find any very large (abar > 2 kpc) bars. Comparison to other
studies reveals that while the optical bar fraction for S0s shows only
a modest variation across low-to-intermediate density environments
(field to intermediate-density clusters), it can be higher by up to a
factor of ~2 in the very high-density environment of the rich Coma
cluster core.