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Description
In this Letter, I distinguish "passive" inner rings to be those with no current star formation, as distinct from "active" inner rings which have undergone recent star formation. I built a sample of nearby galaxies with inner rings observed in the near- and mid-infrared by the NIRS0S and the S^4^G surveys. I used archival far-ultraviolet (FUV) and H{alpha} imaging of 319 galaxies to diagnose whether their inner rings are passive or active. I found that passive rings are found only in early-type disc galaxies (-3<=T<=2). In this range of stages, 21+/-3% and 28+/-5% of rings are passive according to the FUV and H{alpha} indicators, respectively. A ring which is passive according to FUV is always passive according to H{alpha}, but the reverse is not always true. Ring-lenses form 30-40% of passive rings, which is four times more than the fraction of ring-lenses found in active rings in the stage range -3<=T<=2. This is consistent with both a resonance and a manifold origin for the rings because both models predict purely stellar rings to be wider than their star-forming counterparts. In the case of resonance rings, the widening may be at least partly due to the dissolution of rings. If most inner rings have a resonance origin, I estimate 200Myr to be a lower bound for their dissolution time-scale. This time-scale is on the order of one orbital period at the radius of inner rings.
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