Evolution of oxygen and nitrogen abundances and nitrogen production mechanism in massive star-forming galaxies

Abstract

Utilizing the observational data of 55,318 star-forming galaxies (SFGs) selected from the catalog of MPA-JHU emission-line measurements for the SDSS DR8, we investigate the galaxy downsizing effect of their O and N enrichments, and the nitrogen production mechanism in them. We show the redshift evolution of O and N abundances and specific star formation rates for different galaxy mass ranges, demonstrating the galaxy downsizing effect caused by less massive progenitors of less massive galaxies. The O and N abundances do not remain constant for different galaxy mass ranges, and the enrichment (and hence star formation) decreases with increasing galaxy stellar mass. We find evidence of the O enrichment for galaxies with stellar masses $M_{\ast }>10^{11.0}$ (in units of $M_{\odot }$), i.e. $\Delta (\log (O/H))\sim 0.10$ and $\Delta (\log (N/H))\sim 0.28$ from redshift 0.023 to 0.30. Based on the evolutionary schematic model of N/O ratios in Coziol et al., who proposed the scheme that the production of nitrogen is the consequence of a sequence of bursts in SFGs, we conclude that the nitrogen production is dominated by the intermediate-mass stars, which dominate the secondary synthesis in SFGs. However, for galaxies with $M_{\ast }>10^{10.35}$ we find evidence of enhanced N/O abundance ratios, which are significantly above the secondary synthesis line. This suggests that outflows of massive stars, which deplete oxygen efficiently, are more important in massive galaxies. Finally we find an excellent linear relation between $M_{\ast }$ and log(N/O), indicating that the N/O abundance ratio is a good indicator of the stellar mass in a SFG and may be used as a standard candle for studying cosmology, if confirmed with further studies.

Updated to match the published version in MNRAS. 25 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (9)

• UV Star Formation Rates in the Local Universe
• Some Aspects of Measurement Error in Linear Regression of Astronomical Data
• The Mass-Metallicity Relation at z~2
• A Cosmology-Independent Calibration of Gamma-Ray Burst Luminosity Relations and the Hubble Diagram
• Empirical strong-line oxygen abundance calibrations from galaxies with electron temperature measurements
• Physical properties of galaxies and their evolution in the VIMOS VLT Deep Survey. I. The evolution of the mass-metallicity relation up to z~0.9
• The metallicity - redshift relations for emission-line SDSS galaxies: examination of the dependence on the star formation rate
• The star formation history and chemical evolution of star forming galaxies in the nearby universe
• Nitrogen Production in Starburst Galaxies Detected by GALEX

Cited by in corpus (12)

• P-MaNGA: Emission Lines Properties - Gas Ionisation and Chemical Abundances from Prototype Observations
• A Tight Relation Between N/O Ratio and Galaxy Stellar Mass Can Explain the Evolution of Strong Emission Line Ratios with Redshift
• Outer-disk reddening and gas-phase metallicities: The CALIFA connection
• Cosmological evolution of the Nitrogen abundance
• The MZ relation for local star-forming galaxies
• Origin of the Galaxy Mass-Metallicity-Star-Formation Relation
• The Metallicity measurement of Early-type Galaxies
• Spatially-resolved properties of the ionized gas in the HII galaxy J084220+115000
• The evolution and dependence of the local mass-metallicity relation
• Estimating The Metallicity of Star-forming Early-type Galaxies
• Measuring the Metallicity of Early-type Galaxies. I. Composite Region
• Star Formation in CALIFA survey perturbed galaxies. II. Star Formation Histories and Oxygen Abundances