The role of bars in the AGN feeding

Abstract

The nuclear activity phenomenon is a result of the gas and star feeding of supermassiveblack holes (SMBHs) hosted in the central region of galaxies. One of the greatest current challenges is to understand how active galactic nuclei (AGNs) can be fed during their lifetime. The search for universal feeding mechanisms has been made searching for morphological signatures in the central kpc regions of nearby AGNs with high spatial resolution (a few hundred kpc), although with little success. One of the mechanisms most suggested as responsible for this phenomenon are the bars in galaxies.We intend to use the samples studied by Gadotti (2009) that contains all galaxies of Data Release 2 of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), for which he performed a two-dimensional bulge/disk/bar decomposition, and that contains spectra available for the nuclear activity classification. The final sample has 575 galaxies. Gadotti (2009) provides reliable structural parameters, like total stellar mass, bulge stellar mass, bulge effective radius, bulge/total and bar structural parameters. Through a careful analysis of this parameters in galaxies classified as Normal, Seyfert and LINER we intend to understand whether exist some kind of correlation between nuclear activity and the existence or not of bars. (AU)