Exploring Stellar and Ionized Gas Noncircular Motions in Barred Galaxies with MUSE

Abstract

We present Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) integral-field stellar and ionized velocity maps for a sample of 14 barred galaxies. Most of these objects exhibit “S”-shape isovelocities in the bar region indicative of the presence of streaming motions in the velocity fields. By applying circular rotation models we observe that bars leave symmetric structures in the residual maps of the stellar velocity. We built noncircular rotation models using the XookSuut tool to characterize the observed velocity fields; in particular we adopt bisymmetric models and a harmonic decomposition for a bar potential for describing the nonaxisymmetric velocities. We find that both models are able to reproduce the oval distortion observed in the velocity maps. Furthermore, the position angle of the oval distortion estimated from the bisymmetric model correlates with the photometric bar position angle (ρ pearson = 0.95), which suggests that noncircular velocities are caused by the bar. Because of the weak detection of Hα in our objects we are not able to compare gas to stellar noncircular motions in our sample, although we show that when galaxies are gas-rich, oval distortion is also observed but with larger amplitudes. Finally, we do not find evidence that the amplitude of the noncircular motions is dependent on the bar size, stellar mass, or global star formation rate.