A MUSE view on gas inflows to the nuclei of barred galaxies

Abstract:

Gas inflows contribute to the evolution of galaxies in a plethora of ways, e.g., by forming stellar substructures in the nuclear regions, feeding AGN and quenching star formation. In barred galaxies, they occur in straight shocks along the bar, though these straight shocks weaken in the central kpc, leaving the dominant driving mechanism for gas inflows in galactic centres not yet fully understood. Shocks persisting over large regions in the inner kpc could cause gas inflow and should be observable as coherent velocity jumps in the gas kinematic maps. With the aid of integral-field unit observations from MUSE on the VLT — which has a large field of view that maximizes the prospect of finding these coherent structures — we study ionized gas kinematic maps of the centres of ~20 barred galaxies from the Composite Bulges Survey (Erwin et al. 2021) and the TIMER Survey (Gadotti et al. 2019) of nearby galaxies. Using the methodology developed in Kolcu et al. 2023 that involves residual velocity and velocity difference maps, we identify coherent kinematic structures, with the aim to determine the dominant mechanism of inflow in the nuclear regions of galaxies and understand whether this mechanism is analogous to large-scale bar driven inflows. In this presentation, we introduce our methodology and present our findings for galaxies from our sample.