Galaxies and Cosmology Seminar

Stellar bars are considered to be powerful drivers of secular evolution in disk galaxies. With the advent of JWST, we have entered a new era of bar studies beyond z~1. We present one of the very first studies of the relationship between bars, SF activity, and host galaxy properties over the last 10 Gyr from z ∼ 2 to z ∼ 0. Our main results are as follows: 1) The fractional contribution of quiescent galaxies to the bar fraction rises significantly from z ∼ 2 to z ∼ 0 while that of actively SF galaxies falls. 2) The fraction of quiescent galaxies that are barred rises steeply over the last 10 Gyr while that of actively SF rises at a much shallower rate. 3) TNG50-1 simulations with abar > 1.5 kpc are in remarkably good agreement with the results in point 2. 4) At high z (z ∼ 1–2) barred galaxies tend to have predominantly high sSFRs, but at lower z (z~0.5-1), we see the emergence of barred galaxies with both low sSFR and higher n (n > 2), suggesting more bulge-dominated, quiescent galaxies.