Fast cloud–cloud collisions in a strongly barred galaxy: suppression of massive star formation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent galaxy observations show that star formation activity changes depending on galactic environments. In order to understand the diversity of galactic-scale star formation, it is crucial to understand the formation and evolution of giant molecular clouds in an extreme environment. We focus on observational evidence that bars in strongly barred galaxies lack massive stars even though quantities of molecular gas are sufficient to form stars. In this paper, we present a hydrodynamical simulation of a strongly barred galaxy, using a stellar potential which is taken from observational results of NGC 1300, and we compare cloud properties between different galactic environments: bar, bar-end, and spiral arms. We find that the mean of cloud’s virial parameter is αvir ∼ 1 and that there is no environmental dependence, indicating that the gravitationally bound state of a cloud is not behind the observational evidence of the lack of massive stars in strong bars. Instead, we focus on cloud–cloud collisions, which have been proposed as a triggering mechanism for massive star formation. We find that the collision speed in the bar is faster than those in the other regions. We examine the collision frequency using clouds’ kinematics and conclude that the fast collisions in the bar could originate from random-like motion of clouds due to elliptical gas orbits shifted by the bar potential. These results suggest that the observed regions of lack of active star formation in the strong bar originate from the fast cloud–cloud collisions, which are inefficient in forming massive stars, due to the galactic-scale violent gas motion.