Metallicity Calibrations and the Mass-Metallicity Relation for Star-forming Galaxies

By Lisa J. Kewley, Sara L. Ellison. 2008

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We investigate the effect of metallicity calibrations, AGN classification, and aperture covering fraction on the local mass-metallicity (M-Z) relation using 27,730 star-forming galaxies from the SDSS Data Release 4. We analyze the SDSS M-Z relation with 10 metallicity calibrations, including theoretical and empirical methods. We show that the choice of metallicity calibration has a significant effect on the shape and y-intercept [12 + log (O/H) ] of the M-Z relation. The absolute metallicity scale (y-intercept) varies up to Δ [ log (O/H) ] = 0.7 dex, depending on the calibration used, and the change in shape is substantial. These results indicate that it is critical to use the same metallicity calibration when comparing different luminosity-metallicity or M-Z relations. We present new metallicity conversions that allow metallicities that have been derived using different strong-line calibrations to be converted to the same base calibration. These conversions facilitate comparisons between different samples, particularly comparisons between galaxies at different redshifts for which different suites of emission lines are available. Our new conversions successfully remove the large 0.7 dex discrepancies between the metallicity calibrations, and we reach agreement in the M-Z relation to within 0.03 dex on average. We investigate the effect of AGN classification and aperture covering fraction on the M-Z relation. We find that different AGN classification methods have negligible effect on the SDSS M-Z relation. We compare the SDSS M-Z relation with nuclear and global relations from the NFGS. The turnover of the M-Z relation at M* ∼ 1010 M☉ depends on the aperture covering fraction. We find that a lower redshift limit of z < 0.04 is insufficient for avoiding aperture effects in fiber spectra of the highest stellar mass (M* > 1010 M☉) galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/74eb6ffcbd8b6cb30768d4c9bb237371bb7c548e

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Citations in the corpus

New calibrations for abundance determinations in H ii regions (2016, methodology): “…by factors of 1.5 to 5 higher than those derived through the directTe method or through empirical calibrations (e.g.,Kennicutt, Bresolin & Garnett 2003; Pilyugin 2003; Kewley & Ellison 2008; Bresolin et al. 2009; Moustakas et al. 2010; López-Sánchez & Esteban 2010; López-Sánchez et al. 2012).”
The n ature of submillimetre galaxies in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations (2009, background): “Note that the amplitude agreement is perhaps not so meaningful given the systematic uncertainties in metallicity measures of distant galaxies (e.g. Kewley & Ellison 2008), but the relative metallicities (and hence the trend with M∗) are likely more robust.”
EXTRAGALACTIC CHEMICAL ABUNDANCES: DO H ii REGIONS AND YOUNG STARS TELL THE SAME STORY? THE CASE OF THE SPIRAL GALAXY NGC 300 (2009, methodology): “…assumed that all H II regions, includ- ing those at large galactocentric distance, belong to the upper branch of the calibration, even if their [N II]/Hα, the usual discriminator between lower and upper branch, is around the turnover value (around [N II]/Hα = −1.1 to −1.3, Kewley & Ellison 2008).”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – VIII. The observational properties of post-merger galaxies (2013, methodology): “Following Scudder et al. (2012a,b), we calculate the metallicity of star-forming galaxies according to the formalism of Kewley & Dopita (2002), as recently re-assessed by Kewley & Ellison (2008).”
Eliminating error in the chemical abundance scale for extragalactic H ii regions (2012, methodology): “This type of curvature was also observed by Kewley & Ellison (2008), if we can interpret the mass sequence of galaxies as equivalent to an abundance sequence.”
High luminosity, slow ejecta and persistent carbon lines: SN 2009dc challenges thermonuclear explosion scenarios (2010, methodology): “Using the conversion formulae of Kewley & Ellison (2008), we converted these metallicity values to the scale of Tremonti et al. (2004) to place them on a common scale with the fiducial MZ relation, and compared these to the solar oxygen abundance of Delahaye et al. (2010).”
Deriving model-based Te-consistent chemical abundances in ionized gaseous nebulae (2014, neutral): “These differences can be as high as 0.7dex depending on the models and the Z regime (see for a discussion on this Kewley & Ellison 2008).”
THE MASS–METALLICITY RELATION WITH THE DIRECT METHOD ON STACKED SPECTRA OF SDSS GALAXIES (2012, methodology): “The stacks in panel (a) show the metallicity from the upper branch of R23, which were selected to have log([N ii] λ6583/Hα) > −1.1 (Kewley & Ellison 2008).”
Star formation in semi-analytic galaxy formation models with multiphase gas (2015, background): “The three fiducial models make very similar predictions for the stellar phase MZR, except that massive galaxies become enriched much earlier in our two new models (GK and BR) than in the KS model.”
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, neutral): “…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).”
PHYSICAL CONDITIONS IN A YOUNG, UNREDDENED, LOW-METALLICITY GALAXY AT HIGH REDSHIFT (2010, methodology): “All measurements are either from the [N II]/Hα calibration of Pettini & Pagel (2004) or have been converted to this method using the prescriptions of Kewley & Ellison (2008).”
HYDROGEN-POOR SUPERLUMINOUS SUPERNOVAE AND LONG-DURATION GAMMA-RAY BURSTS HAVE SIMILAR HOST GALAXIES (2013, background): “However, there are known systematic offsets between them (e.g., Kewley & Ellison 2008).”
SDSS-IV MaNGA : the impact of diffuse ionized gas on emission-line ratios, interpretation of diagnostic diagrams and gas metallicity measurements (2016, methodology): “We use the method of Kewley & Ellison (2008) to determine which branch a spaxel is on and derive the metallicity.”
A NEW DIAGNOSTIC OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI: REVEALING HIGHLY ABSORBED SYSTEMS AT REDSHIFT >0.3 (2011, background): “Kewley & Ellison (2008) found that using a covering fraction down to 20% (z ∼ 0.04) is not sufficient to obtain global emission line properties for massive galaxies (with M⋆ > 10 10 M⊙).”
Predicting dust extinction from the stellar mass of a galaxy (2010, background): “…are introduced through the known correlations between galaxy properties – more massive galaxies tend to be more metal-rich (e.g. Tremonti et al. 2004; Kewley & Ellison 2008) and, amongst star-forming galaxies, more massive galaxies also have a greater typical SFR (e.g. Brinchmann et al. 2004).1…”
GALAXY MERGERS AND THE MASS–METALLICITY RELATION: EVIDENCE FOR NUCLEAR METAL DILUTION AND FLATTENED GRADIENTS FROM NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS (2010, methodology): “1 These numbers are smaller than presented in Rupke et al. (2008), and result from an updated analysis made possible by a recalibrated mass-metallicity relation using the [N II]/[O II] metallicity diagnostic (Kewley & Ellison 2008).”
ON THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN STAR FORMATION AND FEEDBACK IN GALAXY FORMATION SIMULATIONS (2014, methodology): “We compare the simulations with observational data of galaxies at z ∼ 0.07 (as inferred by Kewley & Ellison 2008), z ∼ 2.2 (Erb et al. 2006) and z ∼ 3.5, where a uniform calibration of metallicity indicators was used across all redshifts (Maiolino et al. 2008).”