The gas-phase metallicities of star-forming galaxies in aperture-matched SDSS samples follow potential rather than mass or average surface density

Abstract

We present a comparative study of the relation between the aperture-based gas-phase metallicity and three structural parameters of star-forming galaxies: mass ($\mathrm{M}\equiv {\mathrm{M}}_{\ast }$), average potential ($\Phi \equiv {\mathrm{M}}_{\ast }/{\mathrm{R}}_{\mathrm{e}}$) and average surface mass density ($\Sigma \equiv {\mathrm{M}}_{\ast }/{\mathrm{R}}_{\mathrm{e}}^2$; where ${\mathrm{R}}_{\mathrm{e}}$ is the effective radius). We use a volume-limited sample drawn from the publicly available SDSS DR7, and base our analysis on aperture-matched sampling by selecting sets of galaxies where the SDSS fibre probes a fixed fraction of ${\mathrm{R}}_{\mathrm{e}}$. We find that between 0.5 and 1.5 ${\mathrm{R}}_{\mathrm{e}}$, the gas-phase metallicity correlates more tightly with $\Phi$ than with either $\mathrm{M}$ or $\Sigma$, in that for all aperture-matched samples, the potential-metallicity relation has (i) less scatter, (ii) higher Spearman rank correlation coefficient and (iii) less residual trend with ${\mathrm{R}}_{\mathrm{e}}$ than either the mass-metallicity relation and the average surface density-metallicity relation. Our result is broadly consistent with the current models of gas enrichment and metal loss. However, a more natural explanation for our findings is a local relation between the gas-phase metallicity and escape velocity.

Accepted by MNRAS; 17 pages, 11 figures, 1 table

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