Differences in galaxy colours are not just about the mass
Matthee JJ. 2021. Differences in galaxy colours are not just about the mass. Nature Astronomy. 5, 984–985.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06786
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Corresponding author has ISTA affiliation
Abstract
Observations show that star-forming galaxies reside on a tight three-dimensional 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 three-dimensional 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 toward 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.
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Publishing Year
Date Published
2021-07-05
Journal Title
Nature Astronomy
Publisher
Springer Nature
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 multi-dimensional datasets and the use of Python and its numpy, matplotlib and pandas packages.
Volume
5
Page
984-985
eISSN
IST-REx-ID
Cite this
Matthee JJ. Differences in galaxy colours are not just about the mass. Nature Astronomy. 2021;5:984-985. doi:10.1038/s41550-021-01415-y
Matthee, J. J. (2021). Differences in galaxy colours are not just about the mass. Nature Astronomy. Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01415-y
Matthee, Jorryt J. “Differences in Galaxy Colours Are Not Just about the Mass.” Nature Astronomy. Springer Nature, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01415-y.
J. J. Matthee, “Differences in galaxy colours are not just about the mass,” Nature Astronomy, vol. 5. Springer Nature, pp. 984–985, 2021.
Matthee JJ. 2021. Differences in galaxy colours are not just about the mass. Nature Astronomy. 5, 984–985.
Matthee, Jorryt J. “Differences in Galaxy Colours Are Not Just about the Mass.” Nature Astronomy, vol. 5, Springer Nature, 2021, pp. 984–85, doi:10.1038/s41550-021-01415-y.
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