Investigating the nuclear activity of barred spiral galaxies: the case   of NGC 1672
  We have performed an X-ray study of the nearby barred spiral galaxy NGC1672, primarily to ascertain the effect of the bar on its nuclear activity. We use both Chandra and XMM-Newton observations to investigate its X-ray properties, together with supporting high-resolution optical imaging data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), infrared imaging from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and ATCA ground-based radio data. We detect 28 X-ray sources within the D25 area of the galaxy, many of which correlate spatially with star-formation in the bar and spiral arms, while two are identified as background galaxies in the HST images. Nine of the X-ray sources are ULXs, with the three brightest (LX > 5E39 erg/s) located at the ends of the bar. With the spatial resolution of Chandra, we are able to show for the first time that NGC1672 possesses a hard (Gamma~1.5) nuclear X-ray source with a 2-10 keV luminosity of 4E38 erg/s. This is surrounded by an X-ray bright circumnuclear star-forming ring, comprised of point sources and hot gas, which dominates the 2-10 keV emission in the central region of the galaxy. The spatially resolved multiwavelength photometry indicates that the nuclear source is a low-luminosity AGN (LLAGN), but with star formation activity close to the central black hole. A high-resolution multiwavelength survey is required to fully assess the impact of both large-scale bars and smaller-scale phenomena such as nuclear bars, rings and nuclear spirals on the fueling of LLAGN. 
L. P. Jenkins, W. N. Brandt, E. J. M. Colbert, B. Koribalski, K. D.   Kuntz, A. J. Levan, R. Ojha, T. P. Roberts, M. J. Ward...
astro-ph.CO