A fundamental relation between the metallicity, gas content, and stellar mass of local galaxies

By M. Bothwell, R. Maiolino, Robert C. Kennicutt Jr., G. Cresci, F. Mannucci, A. Marconi, C. Cicone. 2013

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent results have suggested that the well known mass-metallicity relation has a strong dependence on the star formation rate, to the extent that a three dimensional ‘fundamental metallicity relation’ exists which links the three parameters with minimal scatter. In this work, we use a sample of 4253 local galaxies observed in atomic hydrogen from the ALFALFA survey to demonstrate, for the first time, that a similar fundamental relation (the Hi-FMR) also exists between stellar mass, gas-phase metallicity, and Hi mass. This latter relation is likely more fundamental, driving the relation between metallicity, SFR and mass. At intermediate masses, the behaviour of the gas fundamental metallicity relation is very similar to that expressed via the star formation rate. However, we find that the dependence of metallicity on Hi content persists to the highest stellar masses, in contrast to the ‘saturation’ of metallicity with SFR. It is interesting to note that the dispersion of the relation is very low at intermediate stellar masses (9 < log(M∗/M⊙) < 11), suggesting that in this range galaxies evolve smoothy, in an equilibrium between gas inflow, outflow and star formation. At high and low stellar masses, the scatter of the relation is significantly higher, suggesting that merging events and/or stochastic accretion and star formation may drive galaxies outside the relation. We also assemble a sample of galaxies observed in CO. However, due to a small sample size, strong selection bias, and the influence of a metallicitydependent CO/H2 conversion factor, the data are insufficient to test any influence of molecular gas on metallicity.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/349a380d3ce93c0132f8e26bf74ece67fed994c0

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Citations in the corpus

THE UNIVERSAL RELATION OF GALACTIC CHEMICAL EVOLUTION: THE ORIGIN OF THE MASS–METALLICITY RELATION (2014, background): “Bothwell et al. (2013) are not able to investigate the redshift dependence of the relation between stellar mass, metallicity and gas content due to lack of measurements of atomic gas in galaxies outside the local Universe.”
Star formation sustained by gas accretion (2014, background): “5.2 The stellar mass-metallicity-gas mass relationship Bothwell et al. (2013) point out that the FMR relationship between stellar mass, metallicity, and SFR described in Sect.”
simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, result): “Such trends have also been noted in observations (Bothwell et al. 2013) and in EAGLE (Lagos et al. 2016).”
THE UNIVERSAL STELLAR MASS–STELLAR METALLICITY RELATION FOR DWARF GALAXIES (2013, background): “In fact, Bothwell et al. (2013) established that the offset in the MZR correlates better with H I gas mass than SFR.”
The evolution of the dust and gas content in galaxies (2013, background): “More recently, Bothwell et al. (2013) have shown that the FMR is likely a by-product of a more fundamental relation, between H i gas mass, stellar mass and metallicity (H i-FMR).”
Dusty Star Forming Galaxies at High Redshift (2014, background): “For example, CO dynamical mass measurements (e.g. Greve et al., 2005; Tacconi et al., 2008; Bothwell et al., 2013a) in combination with an assumed dark halo profile can provide a constraint on the remaining stellar mass.”
The mass–metallicity and the fundamental metallicity relation revisited on a fully Te-based abundance scale for galaxies (2019, background): “…the byproduct of a more fundamental relationship between the gas metallicity and the gas fraction: this has been indeed observed in small samples of local galaxies (Bothwell et al. 2013, 2016b,a), as well as predicted by cosmological simulations (e.g. Lagos et al. 2016; De Rossi et al. 2017).”
Metallicity evolution, metallicity gradients, and gas fractions at z ~ 3.4 (2013, background): “Indeed, Bothwell et al. (2013) have shown that the anticorrelation with the SFR (with small dispersion) is only found if both metallicity and SFR are extracted from the same aperture (and actually from the same spectrum integrated within the same aperture), while the scatter increases largely if…”
Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, methodology): “The cold gas content shows a similar correlation, with high H i-mass galaxies having lower metallicities (Bothwell et al. 2013a, Lara-López et al. 2013).”