Bar fraction and its dependence on host galaxy properties in the local Universe

ABSTRACT Bar fraction studies help explain factors that influence bar formation and evolution in disc galaxies. While previous studies have shown that bar presence may depend on the host galaxy’s properties, the exact trends are inconclusive due to a combination of sample selection biases, differences in bar identification techniques, and image quality. To address these systematic differences, we investigate bar fractions in the local Universe using a large sample of visually classified galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey with deeper imaging from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Legacy Imaging Surveys and neutral atomic gas measurements from the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey. We find that the average bar fraction in our sample with H i detections is $\sim 34~{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$, which is in good agreement with previous optical bar fraction studies. Our key results are (a) bar fractions are bimodal in stellar mass (and colour) with a minimum around $\sim 10^{10.2} M_{\odot }$, which corresponds to the transition region between the blue cloud and the red sequence; (b) in massive disc galaxies, bar fraction shows a strong anticorrelation with H i gas fraction, while in low-mass galaxies, the opposite is true; and (c) bar size increases with stellar mass, colour, and concentration such that massive redder bulge-dominated galaxies host longer bars than less massive bluer disc-dominated galaxies. In general, gas-poor galaxies tend to host longer bars than gas-rich galaxies.