The evolution of barred spiral galaxies in the Hubble Deep Fields North and South

The frequency of barred spiral galaxies as a function of redshift contains important information on the gravitational influence of stellar disks in their dark matter halos and also may distinguish between contemporary theories for the origin of galactic bulges. In this paper we present a new quantitative method for determining the strength of barred spiral structure, and verify its robustness to redshift-dependent effects. By combining galaxy samples from the Hubble Deep Field North with newly available data from the Hubble Deep Field South, we are able to define a statistical sample of 18 objectively-defined low-inclination barred spiral systems with I814W < 23.2 mag. Analysing the proportion of barred spiral galaxies seen as a function of redshift, we find a significant decline in the barred fraction beyond redshifts z ≃ 0.5. The physical significance of this effect remains unclear, but several possibilities include dynamically hotter (or increasingly dark-matter dominated) high-redshift discs, or an enhanced efficiency in bar destruction at high redshifts. By investigating the formation of the “orthogonal” axis of Hubble’s classification tuning fork, our result complements studies of evolution in the early–late sequence, and pushes to later epochs the redshift at which the Hubble classification sequence is observed to be in place.

[1]  G. Vaucouleurs.  Integrated Colors of Bright Galaxies in the u, b, V System. , 1961 .

[2]  ROBERT E. Williams,et al.  The Hubble Deep Field: Observations, Data Reduction, and , 1996, astro-ph/9607174.

[3]  Galaxies with Spiral Structure up to z 0.87: Limits on M/L and the Stellar Velocity Dispersion , 1997, astro-ph/9705192.

[4]  University of Cambridge,et al.  The star formation history of the Hubble sequence: spatially resolved colour distributions of intermediate-redshift galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field , 1999 .

[5]  Sidney van den Bergh,et al.  Galaxy Morphology And Classification , 1998 .

[6]  Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of the CFRS and LDSS Redshift Surveys. II. Structural Parameters and the Evolution of Disk Galaxies to Z approximately 1 , 1997, astro-ph/9712061.

[7]  R. A. James,et al.  A dynamical instability of bars in disk galaxies , 1991, Nature.

[8]  S. White,et al.  Accretion of satellite galaxies and the density of the Universe , 1994 .

[9]  Allan Sandage,et al.  Revised Shapley-Ames Catalog of Bright Galaxies , 1980 .

[10]  G. Gilmore,et al.  Baryonic dark matter , 1990 .

[11]  K. Tomita.  Observations in a Super--Horizon-Scale Inhomogeneous Cosmological Model , 1995 .

[12]  L. Simard,et al.  Quantitative Morphology of Galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field , 1998, astro-ph/9807223.

[13]  A. Sandage,et al.  Evidence from the motions of old stars that the Galaxy collapsed. , 1962 .

[14]  Puragra Guhathakurta,et al.  A catalog of digital images of 113 nearby galaxies , 1996 .

[15]  R. Miller,et al.  NUMERICAL EXPERIMENTS ON SPIRAL STRUCTURE. , 1970 .

[16]  Stephen C. Odewahn,et al.  Automated Morphological Classification in Deep Hubble Space Telescope UBVI Fields: Rapidly and Passively Evolving Faint Galaxy Populations , 1996 .

[17]  H. Hasan,et al.  Chaotic orbits in barred galaxies with central mass concentrations , 1990 .

[18]  N. R. Tanvir,et al.  Galaxy morphology to I = 25 mag in the Hubble Deep Field , 1996 .

[19]  A Blind Test of Photometric Redshift Prediction , 1998, astro-ph/9801133.

[20]  R. Redman.  Stellar Populations , 1960, Nature.

[21]  Edwin L. Turner,et al.  A Catalog of Color-based Redshift Estimates for Z <~ 4 Galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field , 1998 .

[22]  Peter Nilson,et al.  Uppsala general catalogue of galaxies , 1973 .

[23]  The Contribution of Late-Type/Irregulars to the Faint Galaxy Counts from Hubble Space Telescope Medium-Deep Survey Images , 1995, astro-ph/9511123.

[24]  H. Lin,et al.  Evolution of the Galaxy Population Based on Photometric Redshifts in the Hubble Deep Field , 1997 .

[25]  A. Naim,et al.  A Comparative study of morphological classifications of APM galaxies , 1995 .

[26]  Karl Glazebrook,et al.  A Morphological Catalog of Galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field , 1996 .

[27]  B. Santiago,et al.  The morphological identification of the rapidly evolving population of faint galaxies , 1995, astro-ph/9503101.

[28]  Karl Glazebrook,et al.  The morphologies of distant galaxies. II. Classifications from the Hubble Space Telescope medium deep survey , 1996 .

[29]  P. Peebles,et al.  A Numerical Study of the Stability of Flattened Galaxies: or, can Cold Galaxies Survive? , 1973 .

[30]  J. Barnes.  Transformations of galaxies. I: Mergers of equal-mass stellar disks , 1992 .