The Role of Environment in the Mass-Metallicity Relation
arXiv:0805.0308 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13714.x
Abstract
Using a sample of 57,377 star-forming galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we study the relationship between gas-phase oxygen abundance and environment in the local Universe. We find that there is a strong relationship between metallicity and environment such that more metal-rich galaxies favor regions of higher overdensity. Furthermore, this metallicity-density relation is comparable in strength to the color-density relation along the blue cloud. After removing the mean dependence of environment on color and luminosity, we find a significant residual trend between metallicity and environment that is largely driven by galaxies in high-density regions, such as groups and clusters. We discuss the potential source of this relationship between metallicity and local galaxy density in the context of feedback models, with special attention paid to quantifying the impact of environment on the scatter in the mass-metallicity relation. We find that environment is a non-negligible source of scatter in this fundamental relation, with > 15% of the measured scatter correlated with environment.
Submitted to MNRAS
References in corpus (9)
- UV Star Formation Rates in the Local Universe
- The Origin of the Galaxy Mass-Metallicity Relation and Implications for Galactic Outflows
- The Discovery of 1000 km/s Outflows in Massive Post-starburst Galaxies at z=0.6
- Clues to the Origin of the Mass-Metallicity Relation: Dependence on Star Formation Rate and Galaxy Size
- The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: The Role of Galaxy Environment in the Cosmic Star-Formation History
- The effects of environment on morphological evolution between 0<z<1.2 in the COSMOS Survey
- The environmental dependence of the chemical properties of star-forming galaxies
- Outflow or galactic wind: The fate of ionized gas in the halos of dwarf galaxies
- Clustering of supernova Ia host galaxies