The impact of bars on quenching galaxies across cosmic times: constraints from a nearby spatially resolved analysis

Bars are a common feature of disk galaxies in the local Universe and it is also believed that they play a crucial role in the secular evolution of the host galaxies and in the dynamical (re)distribution of gas. Therefore it is of significant relevance to further investigate the impact of these elongated structures on the quenching phase of galactic star formation and, actually, this is the aim of my thesis. In particular, I perform a spatially resolved analysis on sub-galactic scales for a sample of nearby barred galaxies, exploiting photometric information over about 20 bands (from the UV to the far-IR) from the publicly available DustPedia database. This work is specifically focused on the spatially resolved relation between stellar mass and star formation rate (i.e. the Main Sequence, MS), in order to understand whether the presence of the bar affects the typical log-linear trend, at least in the inner regions. Besides this, I take advantage of the IllustrisTNG50 simulation to extract an evolutionary prospectus of the galactic star formation (i.e. Star Formation History, SFH) and then of the spatially resolved MS relation for a sample of simulated disk galaxies that have undergone the onset of a bar structure. From these results, I finally try to discuss how the quenching of SFR due to the presence of bars can influence the decreasing evolutionary trend of the Universe’s star formation rate density. The main results of thesis work are: (i) the presence of an anti-correlation track in the spatially resolved Main Sequence of barred galaxies from DustPedia (which is also quite well reproduced by simulated galaxies from IllustrisTNG), (ii) the fact that the time evolution of the total SFR of simulated, more massive, barred galaxies goes as ∼ (1+z)^(2.03) in the redshift range 0 ≤ z ≤ 2.