• DOI:10.3847/1538-4357/aa755b
• Corpus ID: 55059406

Galaxy-scale Bars in Late-type Sloan Digital Sky Survey Galaxies Do Not Influence the Average Accretion Rates of Supermassive Black Holes

@article{Goulding2017GalaxyscaleBI,
  title={Galaxy-scale Bars in Late-type Sloan Digital Sky Survey Galaxies Do Not Influence the Average Accretion Rates of Supermassive Black Holes},
  author={Andy D. Goulding and Eve Matthaey and Jenny E. Greene and Ryan C. Hickox and David M. Alexander and William R. Forman and Christine Jones and Bret D. Lehmer and Samuel Griffis and Svilen Kanev and Mehdi Oulmakki},
  journal={arXiv: Astrophysics of Galaxies},
  year={2017}
}

• A. Goulding, Eve Matthaey, +8 authors Mehdi Oulmakki
• Published 24 May 2017
• Physics
• arXiv: Astrophysics of Galaxies

Galaxy-scale bars are expected to provide an effective means for driving material towards the central region in spiral galaxies, and possibly feeding supermassive black holes (BHs). Here we present a statistically-complete study of the effect of bars on average BH accretion. From a well-selected sample of 50,794 spiral galaxies (with M* ~ 0.2-30 x 10^10 Msun) extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Galaxy Zoo 2 project, we separate those sources considered to contain galaxy-scale bars from those that do not. Using archival data taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, we identify X-ray luminous (L_X >~ 10^41 erg/s) active galactic nuclei (AGN) and perform an X-ray stacking analysis on the remaining X-ray undetected sources. Through X-ray stacking, we derive a time-averaged look at accretion for galaxies at fixed stellar mass and star formation rate, finding that the average nuclear accretion rates of galaxies with bar structures are fully consistent with those lacking bars (Mdot_acc ~ 3 x 10^-5 Msun/yr). Hence, we robustly conclude that large-scale bars have little or no effect on the average growth of BHs in nearby (z < 0.15) galaxies over gigayear timescales.