Chemical abundances in high-redshift galaxies: a powerful new emission line diagnostic
By M. Dopita, Lisa J. Kewley, R. Sutherland, D. Nicholls. 2016
184 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This Letter presents a new, remarkably simple diagnostic specifically designed to derive chemical abundances for high redshift galaxies. It uses only the Hα$\mathrm{H}\alpha$, [N ii] and [S ii] emission lines, which can usually be observed in a single grating setting, and is almost linear up to an abundance of 12+log(O/H)=9.05$12+\log (\mathrm{O}/\mathrm{H}) = 9.05$. It can be used over the full abundance range encountered in high redshift galaxies. By its use of emission lines located close together in wavelength, it is also independent of reddening. Our diagnostic depends critically on the calibration of the N/O ratio. However, by using realistic stellar atmospheres combined with the N/O vs. O/H abundance calibration derived locally from stars and H ii regions, and allowing for the fact that high-redshift H ii regions have both high ionisation parameters and high gas pressures, we find that the observations of high-redshift galaxies can be simply explained by the models without having to invoke arbitrary changes in N/O ratio, or the presence of unusual quantities of Wolf-Rayet stars in these galaxies.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b8a5a9c580b3f2f35122b952358d654e7919175
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Citations in the corpus
- De re metallica: the cosmic chemical evolution of galaxies (2018, background): “The calibration provided by (Dopita et al., 2016) through photoionization models is strongly dependent on the assumed N/O–”
- A Comprehensive Measurement of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant with 1 km s−1 Mpc−1 Uncertainty from the Hubble Space Telescope and the SH0ES Team (2021, unknown): “…period, empirical transformations between strong-line measures like R23 were also revised downward by ∼0.2–0.3 dex, making them more consistent with stellar measures referenced to the Sun (Pettini & Pagel 2004; Kewley & Ellison 2008; Tremonti et al. 2004; Dopita et al. 2016; Curti et al. 2017).”
- New fully empirical calibrations of strong-line metallicity indicators in star forming galaxies (2016, background): “…et al. 2013; Pilyugin & Grebel 2016), or theoretically, in which oxygen abundance have been inferred via photoionization models (e.g. McGaugh 1991; Zaritsky et al. 1994; Kewley & Dopita 2002; Kobulnicky & Kewley 2004; Tremonti et al. 2004; Dopita et al. 2013, 2016), or be a combination of the two.”