Two-dimensional spectroscopy of double-barred galaxies

Abstract

We describe the results of our spectroscopy for a sample of barred galaxies whose inner regions exhibit an isophotal twist commonly called a secondary bar. The line-of-sight velocity fields of the ionized gas and stars and the light-of-sight velocity dispersion fields of the stars were constructed from two-dimensional spectroscopy with the 6m Special Astrophysical Observatory telescope. We detected various types of non-circular motions of ionized gas: radial flows within large-scale bars, counter-rotation of the gas and stars at the center of NGC 3945, a polar gaseous disk in NGC 5850, etc. Our analysis of the optical and near-infrared images (both ground-based and those from the Hubble Space Telescope) revealed circumnuclear minispirals in five objects. The presence of an inner (secondary) bar in the galaxy images is shown to have no effect on the circumnuclear kinematics of the gas and stars. Thus, contrary to popular belief, the secondary bar is not a dynamically decoupled galactic structure. We conclude that the so-called double-barred galaxies are not a separate type of galaxies but are a combination of objects with distinctly different morphology of their circumnuclear regions.