Dr. Sandeep Kataria

We conduct a statistical study of black hole masses of barred and unbarred galaxies in IllustrisTNG-100 cosmological magneto-hydrodynamical simulations. This work aims to understand the role of the bars in black hole mass growth and its implications on AGN activity. We have looked into 1191 barred galaxies and 2738 unbarred galaxies in TNG-100 simulations. To have an unbiased study, we perform our analysis with an equal number of barred and unbarred galaxies by using various anchors like total galaxy mass, stellar mass, gas mass, dark matter halo mass, etc. We find that the black hole mass distribution median for barred galaxies is higher than that of the unbarred ones. We also find that mean black hole masses of strongly barred galaxies are higher than the black hole masses of weakly barred galaxies. The higher mean accretion rate on the black hole averaged over the large redshifts (approx. z~10 to 0) explains the higher mean black hole masses in barred galaxies. Further, we also test that these results are unaffected by other environmental processes like minor and major merger histories & neighboring gas density of black hole host galaxy, etc. Our results have potential implications for the role of bars in channeling gas to the central regions and triggering AGN activities, debated in recent numerical and observational studies.