Kavli Affiliate: Mark Vogelsberger
| First 5 Authors: Zhi Li, Min Du, Victor P. Debattista, Juntai Shen, Hui Li
| Summary:
Gas flows in the presence of two independently-rotating nested bars remain
not fully understood, which is likely to play an important role in fueling the
central black hole. We use high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations with
detailed models of subgrid physics to study this problem. Our results show that
the inner bar in double-barred galaxies can help drive gas flow from the
nuclear ring to the center. In contrast, gas inflow usually stalls at the
nuclear ring in single-barred galaxies. The inner bar causes a quasi-periodic
inflow with a frequency determined by the difference between the two bar
pattern speeds. We find that the star formation rate is higher in the model
with two bars than in that with one bar. The inner bar in our model gradually
weakens and dissolves due to gas inflow over a few billion years. Star
formation produces metal-rich/$alpha$-poor stars which slows the weakening of
the inner bar, but does not halt its eventual decay. We also present a
qualitative comparison of the gas morphology and kinematics in our simulations
with those of observed double-barred galaxies.
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