Star-forming galaxies are predicted to lie on a fundamental plane of mass, star formation rate, and α-enhancement

Matthee JJ, Schaye J. 2018. Star-forming galaxies are predicted to lie on a fundamental plane of mass, star formation rate, and α-enhancement. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. 479(1), L34–L39.

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Author
Matthee, Jorryt JISTA ; Schaye, Joop
Abstract
Observations show that star-forming galaxies reside on a tight 3D plane between mass, gas-phase metallicity, and star formation rate (SFR), which can be explained by the interplay between metal-poor gas inflows, SFR and outflows. However, different metals are released on different time-scales, which may affect the slope of this relation. Here, we use central, star-forming galaxies with Mstar = 109.0–10.5 M⊙ from the EAGLE hydrodynamical simulation to examine 3D relations between mass, SFR, and chemical enrichment using absolute and relative C, N, O, and Fe abundances. We show that the scatter is smaller when gas-phase α-enhancement is used rather than metallicity. A similar plane also exists for stellar α-enhancement, implying that present-day specific SFRs are correlated with long time-scale star formation histories. Between z = 0 and 1, the α-enhancement plane is even more insensitive to redshift than the plane using metallicity. However, it evolves at z > 1 due to lagging iron yields. At fixed mass, galaxies with higher SFRs have star formation histories shifted towards late times, are more α-enhanced, and this α-enhancement increases with redshift as observed. These findings suggest that relations between physical properties inferred from observations may be affected by systematic variations in α-enhancements.
Publishing Year
Date Published
2018-09-01
Journal Title
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Acknowledgement
We thank the anonymous referee for their constructive comments. JM acknowledges the support of a Huygens PhD fellowship from Leiden University. We thank Jarle Brinchmann, Rob Crain and David Sobral for discussions. We acknowledge the use of the TOPCAT software (Taylor 2013) for assisting in rapid exploration of multidimensional data sets and the use of PYTHON and its NUMPY, MATPLOTLIB, and PANDAS packages.
Volume
479
Issue
1
Page
L34 - L39
ISSN
eISSN
IST-REx-ID

Cite this

Matthee JJ, Schaye J. Star-forming galaxies are predicted to lie on a fundamental plane of mass, star formation rate, and α-enhancement. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. 2018;479(1):L34-L39. doi:10.1093/mnrasl/sly093
Matthee, J. J., & Schaye, J. (2018). Star-forming galaxies are predicted to lie on a fundamental plane of mass, star formation rate, and α-enhancement. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/sly093
Matthee, Jorryt J, and Joop Schaye. “Star-Forming Galaxies Are Predicted to Lie on a Fundamental Plane of Mass, Star Formation Rate, and α-Enhancement.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/sly093.
J. J. Matthee and J. Schaye, “Star-forming galaxies are predicted to lie on a fundamental plane of mass, star formation rate, and α-enhancement,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, vol. 479, no. 1. Oxford University Press, pp. L34–L39, 2018.
Matthee JJ, Schaye J. 2018. Star-forming galaxies are predicted to lie on a fundamental plane of mass, star formation rate, and α-enhancement. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. 479(1), L34–L39.
Matthee, Jorryt J., and Joop Schaye. “Star-Forming Galaxies Are Predicted to Lie on a Fundamental Plane of Mass, Star Formation Rate, and α-Enhancement.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, vol. 479, no. 1, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. L34–39, doi:10.1093/mnrasl/sly093.
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