Mixed early and late-type properties in the bar of NGC 6221: Evidence for evolution along the Hubble sequence?

Rotation curves and velocity dispersion pro- les are presented for both the stellar and gaseous com- ponents along ve dierent position angles (PA = 5, 50 ,9 5, 125, and 155) of the nearby barred spiral NGC 6221. The observed kinematics extends out to about 80 00 from the nucleus. Narrow and broad-band imaging is also presented. The radial proles of the fluxes ratio (N II) ( 6583.4 A)/H reveal the presence of a ring-like struc- ture of ionized gas, with a radius of about 9 00 and a depro- jected circular velocity of about 280 km s 1 . The analysis of the dynamics of the bar indicates this ring is related to the presence of an inner Lindblad resonance (ILR) at 1.3 kpc. NGC 6221 is found to exhibit intermediate prop- erties between those of the early-type barred galaxies: the presence of a gaseous ring at an ILR, the bar edge located between the ILR's and the corotation radius beyond the steep rising portion of the rotation curve, the dust-lane pattern, and those of the late-type galaxies: an almost ex- ponential surface brightness prole, the presence of H regions along all the bar, the spiral-arm pattern. It is con- sistent with scenarios of bar-induced evolution from later to earlier-type galaxies 1 .