Unveiling the nature of the "Green Pea" galaxies

Abstract

We review recent results on the oxygen and nitrogen chemical abundances in extremely compact, low-mass starburst galaxies at redshifts between 0.1-0.3 recently named to as "Green Pea" galaxies. These galaxies are genuine metal-poor galaxies ($\sim$ one fifth solar) with N/O ratios unusually high for galaxies of the same metallicity. In combination with their known general properties, i.e., size, stellar mass and star-formation rate, these findings suggest that these objects could be experiencing a short and extreme phase in their evolution. The possible action of both recent and massive inflow of gas, as well as stellar feedback mechanisms are discussed here as main drivers of the starburst activity and their oxygen and nitrogen abundances.

To appear in JENAM Symposium "Dwarf Galaxies: Keys to Galaxy Formation and Evolution", P. Papaderos, G. Hensler, S. Recchi (eds.). Lisbon, September 2010, Springer Verlag, in press

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• The Metallicity of Galaxy Disks: Infall versus Outflow
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• Green Pea Galaxies and cohorts: Luminous Compact Emission-Line Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• The Sunburst Arc with JWST: I. Detection of Wolf-Rayet stars injecting nitrogen into a low-metallicity, $z=2.37$ proto-globular cluster leaking ionizing photons
• Properties of five z~0.3-0.4 confirmed LyC leakers: VLT/XShooter observations
• Monitoring broad emission-line components in spectra of the two low-metallicity dwarf compact star-forming galaxies SBS 1420+540 and J1444+4840