THE MOSDEF SURVEY: MASS, METALLICITY, AND STAR-FORMATION RATE AT z ∼ 2.3
By R. Sanders, A. Shapley, M. Kriek, Naveen A. Reddy, William Robert Freeman, A. Coil, B. Siana, B. Mobasher, I. Shivaei, S. Price and 1 more. 2014
175 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present results on the z ∼ 2.3 mass–metallicity relation (MZR) using early observations from the MOSFIRE Deep Evolution Field survey. We use an initial sample of 87 star-forming galaxies with spectroscopic coverage of Hβ, [O iii] λ5007, Hα, and [N ii] λ6584 rest-frame optical emission lines, and estimate the gas-phase oxygen abundance based on the N2 and O3N2 strong-line indicators. We find a positive correlation between stellar mass and metallicity among individual z ∼ 2.3 galaxies using both the N2 and O3N2 indicators. We also measure the emission-line ratios and corresponding oxygen abundances for composite spectra in bins of stellar mass. Among composite spectra, we find a monotonic increase in metallicity with increasing stellar mass, offset ∼0.15–0.3 dex below the local MZR. When the sample is divided at the median star-formation rate (SFR), we do not observe significant SFR dependence of the z ∼ 2.3 MZR among either individual galaxies or composite spectra. We furthermore find that z ∼ 2.3 galaxies have metallicities ∼0.1 dex lower at a given stellar mass and SFR than is observed locally. This offset suggests that high-redshift galaxies do not fall on the local “fundamental metallicity relation” among stellar mass, metallicity, and SFR, and may provide evidence of a phase of galaxy growth in which the gas reservoir is built up due to inflow rates that are higher than star-formation and outflow rates. However, robust conclusions regarding the gas-phase oxygen abundances of high-redshift galaxies await a systematic reappraisal of the application of locally calibrated metallicity indicators at high redshift.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff4e1b71e39e283a84fb00abadfcccfd681cbeb2
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Citations in the corpus
- The HDUV Survey: A Revised Assessment of the Relationship between UV Slope and Dust Attenuation for High-redshift Galaxies (2017, background): “The connection between reddening and stellar mass can also be deduced from the mass-metallicity relation (Tremonti et al. 2004; Kewley & Ellison 2008; Andrews & Martini 2013; Erb et al. 2006; Maiolino et al. 2008; Henry et al. 2013; Maseda et al. 2014; Steidel et al. 2014; Sanders et al. 2015).”
- RECONCILING THE STELLAR AND NEBULAR SPECTRA OF HIGH-REDSHIFT GALAXIES (2016, background): “Anomalously high N/O at a given O/H has been advocated as the primary driver of the N2 BPT “offset” (Masters et al. Stellar and Nebular Spectra at z∼ 2.4 27 2014; Shapley et al. 2015; Sanders et al. 2015; Jones et al. 2015).”
- THE MOSDEF SURVEY: ELECTRON DENSITY AND IONIZATION PARAMETER AT z ∼ 2.3 (2015, methodology): “Stellar mass and metallicity are correlated at z ∼ 2.3 as well (e.g., Erb et al. 2006; Maiolino et al. 2008; Steidel et al. 2014; Sanders et al. 2015), but the MZR evolves such that galaxies at a given M∗ have lower metallicities than are observed locally.”
- Nebular Emission Line Ratios in z ≃ 2–3 Star-forming Galaxies with KBSS-MOSFIRE: Exploring the Impact of Ionization, Excitation, and Nitrogen-to-Oxygen Ratio (2016, background): “Galaxies at z ∼ 2.3 also have lower 12+log(O/H) than SDSS galaxies by a comparable amount (Steidel et al. 2014; Wuyts et al. 2014; Sanders et al. 2015), suggesting that there is a relatively constant N/O-O/H relation for all galaxies.”
- Stellar population effects on the inferred photon density at reionization (2015, methodology): “…low mass star forming galaxies of the distant Universe (Stanway et al. 2014), although the evidence for these at intermediate redshifts (z ∼ 2− 3) and whether instead they may represent a shift in nitrogen abundance is still under discussion (e.g. see Sanders et al. 2015, and references therein).”
- simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, methodology): “Observations at z = 2.3 are shown from the MOSDEF survey (Sanders et al. 2015).”
- Chemical abundances in high-redshift galaxies: a powerful new emission line diagnostic (2016, background): “…et al. 2013b,a; Izotov et al. 2015, and references therein) and new insights into the relationship between galaxy mass, metallicity, and star formation rate at high-z (Wuyts et al. 2014; Sanders et al. 2015; Maier et al. 2015; Salim et al. 2015; de los Reyes et al. 2015, and references therein).”
- THE MOSDEF SURVEY: MEASUREMENTS OF BALMER DECREMENTS AND THE DUST ATTENUATION CURVE AT REDSHIFTS z ∼ 1.4–2.6 (2015, background): “…the value of the solar abundance from Allende Prieto et al. (2001) and Asplund et al. (2004)), with a mean oxygen abundance that changes by ' 0.3 dex between the reddest and bluest 9 A discussion of the different metallicity indicators accessible with MOSDEF are discussed in Sanders et al. (2015).”
- De re metallica: the cosmic chemical evolution of galaxies (2018, methodology): “…Finkelstein et al., 2011a; Wuyts et al., 2012; Erb et al., 2010; Cullen et al., 2014; Zahid et al., 2014c; Wuyts et al., 2014b; Steidel et al., 2014; Sanders et al., 2015; Onodera et al., 2015; Sanders et al., 2016b; Bian et al., 2017; Sanders et al., 2018) and z ∼ 3 (Maiolino et al., 2008;…”
- The SINS/zC-SINF Survey of z ∼ 2 Galaxy Kinematics: SINFONI Adaptive Optics–assisted Data and Kiloparsec-scale Emission-line Properties (2018, background): “…AO galaxies to mitigate evolutionary effects (e.g. Erb et al. 2006a; Jones et al. 2010a, 2013; E. Wuyts et al. 2014a, 2016; Troncoso et al. 2014; Zahid et al. 2014; Sanders et al. 2015; Leethochawalit et al. 2016), and to results obtained from the same N2 indicator as used here for consistency.”