The metallicity of the long GRB hosts and the fundamental metallicity relation of low-mass galaxies

By F. Mannucci, Ruben Salvaterra, M. A. Campisi. 2010

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the metallicity properties of host galaxies of long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in the light of the fundamental metallicity relation (FMR), the tight dependence of metallicity on mass and star formation rate (SFR) recently discovered for Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies with stellar masses above 10 9.2 M� . As most of the GRB hosts have masses below this limit, the FMR can only be used after an extension towards lower masses. With this aim, we study the FMR for galaxies with masses down to ∼10 8.3 M� , finding that the FMR does extend smoothly at lower masses, albeit with a much larger scatter. We then compare the resulting FMR with the metallicity properties of 18 host galaxies of long GRBs. While the GRB hosts show a systematic offset with respect to the mass–metallicity relation, they are fully consistent with the FMR. This shows that the difference with the mass–metallicity relation is due to higher than average SFRs and that GRBs with optical afterglows do not preferentially select low-metallicity hosts among the star-forming galaxies. The apparent low metallicity is therefore a consequence of the occurrence of a long GRB in low-mass, actively star-forming galaxies, known to dominate the current cosmic SFR.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/50332c1c5ea41f4be0dc7f9d399323b8a056d19f

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. Bing Zhang
3. L. Hernquist
4. E. Berger
5. C. Faucher-Giguére
6. D. Keres̆
7. R. Dav'e
8. E. Quataert

Citations in the corpus

• Pan-STARRS1 DISCOVERY OF TWO ULTRALUMINOUS SUPERNOVAE AT z ≈ 0.9 (2011, background): “…a recent alternative hypothesis has been offered in which, because low-mass galaxies have higher specific SFRs, the observed bias of GRBs towards low-mass hosts is in fact simply a demonstration that they are associated with young stellar populations (Kocevski & West 2011; Mannucci et al. 2011).”
• The mass–metallicity and the fundamental metallicity relation revisited on a fully Te-based abundance scale for galaxies (2019, background): “…et al. (2010) clearly observed a secondary dependence of the MZR on the SFR in a large sample of SDSS galaxies (then extended toward lower masses by Mannucci et al. 2011), with highly star forming galaxies showing lower metallicities at fixed stellar mass, and first proposed that local galaxies…”
• GRB hosts through cosmic time - VLT/X-Shooter emission-line spectroscopy of 96 γ-ray-burst-selected galaxies at 0.1 (2015, background): “…more diverse: the offset of GRB-selected galaxies towards lower metallicities in the massmetallicity relation (Levesque et al. 2010b) could, for example, be partially explained with the dependence of the metallicity of star-forming galaxies on SFR (e.g., Mannucci et al. 2011; Kocevski & West 2011).”
• HYDROGEN-POOR SUPERLUMINOUS SUPERNOVAE AND LONG-DURATION GAMMA-RAY BURSTS HAVE SIMILAR HOST GALAXIES (2013, background): “It has been argued that this could be a result of a proposed anticorrelation between SFR and metallicity at a given stellar mass; the driving factor then would be star formation rather than metallicity (Mannucci et al. 2010, 2011; Kocevski & West 2011).”
• THE AFTERGLOW OF GRB 130427A FROM 1 TO 1016 GHz (2013, background): “Robertson & Ellis 2012; cf. Savaglio et al. 2009; Mannucci et al. 2011; Elliott et al. 2012) also decreases the local rate.”
• A COMPLETE SAMPLE OF BRIGHT SWIFT LONG GAMMA-RAY BURSTS. I. SAMPLE PRESENTATION, LUMINOSITY FUNCTION AND EVOLUTION (2011, background): “However, such strong metallicity cut-offs seem to be inconsistent with the observed properties of GRB host at z < 1 (Mannucci et al. 2011; Kocevski et al. 2011; Campisi et at.”
• Metallicity evolution, metallicity gradients, and gas fractions at z ~ 3.4 (2013, background): “32 (see Mannucci et al. 2011).”
• A POPULATION OF MASSIVE, LUMINOUS GALAXIES HOSTING HEAVILY DUST-OBSCURED GAMMA-RAY BURSTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE USE OF GRBs AS TRACERS OF COSMIC STAR FORMATION (2013, background): “This could also be an imprint of metallicity: high-sSFR galaxies have lower metallicity at a given mass (Mannucci et al. 2011), although the surprising strength of this effect in the highest-sSFR system requires (at minimum) a very strong metallicity dependence to explain, and may also require…”
• The evolution of the dust and gas content in galaxies (2013, unknown): “32 values published in Mannucci et al. (2011).”
• Ionization state of inter-stellar medium in galaxies: evolution, SFR-M * -Z dependence, and ionizing photon escape (2013, background): “From this plot, the FMR of our SDSS sample is almost identical to that of Mannucci et al. (2010, 2011).”
• The SEDs and host galaxies of the dustiest GRB afterglows (2011, background): “…dusty, and metal-rich galaxies are able to host GRBs, and the trend of low-metallicity GRB hosts is not as significant as claimed in previous studies, and possibly a selection effect of the young galaxy population dominating the global SFR at low-z (e.g., Berger et al. 2007; Mannucci et al. 2011).”
• The Observer's Guide to the Gamma-Ray Burst-Supernova Connection (2016, background): “-selected galaxies towards lower metallicities in the mass-metallicity relation [244] could, for example, be partially explained with the dependence of the metallicity of star-forming galaxies on SFR [253,254]. Moreover, it was shown that LGRBs do not exclusively formed in low-metallicity environmen”
• The origin and evolution of the galaxy mass–metallicity relation (2015, background): “…and some analytic models suggest a fundamental metallicity relation (FMR) between stellar mass, star formation rate, and metallicity that holds for starforming galaxies both in the local universe and at high redshifts (e.g. Mannucci et al. 2010, 2011; Lilly et al. 2013; Zahid et al. 2014).”
• CONNECTING THE GAMMA RAY BURST RATE AND THE COSMIC STAR FORMATION HISTORY: IMPLICATIONS FOR REIONIZATION AND GALAXY EVOLUTION (2011, background): “Mannucci et al. (2011) find that GRB hosts are offset from the mass-metallicity relation owing to their their higher star formation rates than average at fixed stellar mass, but remain within the “fundamental metallicity relation” between star formation rate, stellar mass, and metallicity (Mannucci…”