Speaker
Description
Bars are prevalent features in disc galaxies and play an important role in driving secular evolution, especially through resonances. Stars at corotation resonance with the bar are known to librate around the stable Lagrange points (L4, L5). Here, we investigate the properties of corotating stars by performing an orbital frequency analysis on a subsample of stars in an N-body+SPH galactic simulation to obtain corotating and non-corotating subsamples. Trends in variation of ages and metallicities are investigated by sectioning the galactic plane into radial and azimuthal bins, and comparing the properties of both categories of stars within each bin, using a K-S test to check statistical significance. We confirm the existence of important systematic differences between the distributions of the ages and metallicities of the corotating stars with respect to the surrounding non-corotating stars. Trends in age are found to vary radially and suggest that corotating stars are dragged away from the corotation radius in both directions, whereas the metallicities of stars in corotation are found to be distinctly higher.
