Gas metallicity distributions in SDSS-IV MaNGA galaxies : what drives gradients and local trends?
Abstract
The gas metallicity distributions across individual galaxies and across galaxy samples can teach us much about how galaxies evolve. Massive galaxies typically possess negative metallicity gradients, and mass and metallicity are tightly correlated on local scales over wide range of galaxy masses; however, the precise origins of such trends remain elusive. Here, we employ data from SDSS-IV MaNGA to explore how gas metallicity depends on local stellar mass density and on galactocentric radius within individual galaxies. We also consider how the strengths of these dependencies vary across the galaxy mass-size plane. We find that radius is more predictive of local metallicity than stellar mass density in extended lower mass galaxies, while we find density and radius to be almost equally predictive in higher-mass and more compact galaxies. Consistent with previous work, we find a mild connection between metallicity gradients and large-scale environment; however, this is insufficient to explain variations in gas metallicity behaviour across the mass-size plane. We argue our results to be consistent with a scenario in which extended galaxies have experienced smooth gas accretion histories, producing negative metallicity gradients over time. We further argue that more compact and more massive systems have experienced increased merging activity that disrupts this process, leading to flatter metallicity gradients and more dominant density-metallicity correlations within individual galaxies.
Citation
Boardman , N F , Wild , V , Heckman , T , Sánchez , S F , Riffel , R , Riffel , R A & Zasowski , G 2023 , ' Gas metallicity distributions in SDSS-IV MaNGA galaxies : what drives gradients and local trends? ' , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , vol. 520 , no. 3 , stad277 , pp. 4301–4314 . https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad277
Publication
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0035-8711Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
Funding: NFB and VW acknowledge STFC grant ST/V000861/1. J.B-B thanks IA-100420 (DGAPA-PAPIIT, UNAM) and CONACYT grant CF19-39578 support. RR thanks Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq, Proj. 311223/2020-6, 304927/2017-1 and 400352/2016-8), Fundação de amparo ’a pesquisa do Rio Grande do Sul (FAPERGS, Proj. 16/2551-0000251-7 and 19/1750-2), Coordena¸cão de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES, Proj. 0001). RAR acknowledges financial support from Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (302280/2019-7).Collections
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