NGC 1097 is a nearby barred spiral galaxy believed to be interacting with the
elliptical galaxy NGC 1097A located to its northwest. It hosts a Seyfert 1
nucleus surrounded by a circumnuclear starburst ring. Two straight dust lanes
connected to the ring extend almost continuously out to the bar. The other ends
of the dust lanes attach to two main spiral arms. To provide a physical
understanding of its structural and kinematical properties, two-dimensional
hydrodynamical simulations have been carried out. Numerical calculations reveal
that many features of the gas morphology and kinematics can be reproduced
provided that the gas flow is governed by a gravitational potential associated
with a slowly rotating strong bar. By including the self-gravity of the gas
disk in our calculation, we have found the starburst ring to be gravitationally
unstable which is consistent with the observation in \citet{hsieh11}. Our
simulations show that the gas inflow rate is 0.17 M_\sun yr−1 into the
region within the starburst ring even after its formation, leading to the
coexistence of both a nuclear ring and a circumnuclear disk.Comment: 32 pages, 14 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in the Ap
