A Characteristic Mass Scale in the Mass-Metallicity Relation of Galaxies

Abstract

We study the shape of the gas-phase mass-metallicity relation (MZR) of a combined sample of present-day dwarf and high-mass star-forming galaxies using IZI, a Bayesian formalism for measuring chemical abundances presented in Blanc et al. 2015. We observe a characteristic stellar mass scale at $M_{\ast }\simeq 10^{9.5}$M${}_{\odot }$, above which the ISM undergoes a sharp increase in its level of chemical enrichment. In the $10^6-10^{9.5}$M${}_{\odot }$ range the MZR follows a shallow power-law ($Z\propto M_{\ast }^{\alpha }$) with slope $\alpha =0.14\pm 0.08$. At approaching $M_{\ast }\simeq 10^{9.5}$M${}_{\odot }$ the MZR steepens significantly, showing a slope of $\alpha =0.37\pm 0.08$ in the $10^{9.5}-10^{10.5}$M${}_{\odot }$ range, and a flattening towards a constant metallicity at higher stellar masses. This behavior is qualitatively different from results in the literature that show a single power-law MZR towards the low mass end. We thoroughly explore systematic uncertainties in our measurement, and show that the shape of the MZR is not induced by sample selection, aperture effects, a changing N/O abundance, the adopted methodology used to construct the MZR, secondary dependencies on star formation activity, nor diffuse ionized gas (DIG) contamination, but rather on differences in the method used to measure abundances. High resolution hydrodynamical simulations can qualitatively reproduce our result, and suggest a transition in the ability of galaxies to retain their metals for stellar masses above this threshold. The MZR characteristic mass scale also coincides with a transition in the scale height and clumpiness of cold gas disks, and a typical gas fraction below which the efficiency of star formation feedback for driving outflows is expected to decrease sharply.

arXiv comment24 pages, 11 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (128)

• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
• On the variation of the Initial Mass Function
• The Seventh Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments
• The Origin of the Mass--Metallicity Relation: Insights from 53,000 Star-Forming Galaxies in the SDSS
• The physical properties of star forming galaxies in the low redshift universe
• Stellar Masses and Star Formation Histories for 10^5 Galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The Optical and Near-Infrared Properties of Galaxies: I. Luminosity and Stellar Mass Functions
• Cosmological SPH simulations: A hybrid multi-phase model for star formation
• The Host Galaxies and Classification of Active Galactic Nuclei
• Spectroscopic Target Selection in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: The Main Galaxy Sample
• [O III]/[N II] as an Abundance Indicator at High Redshift
• Overview of the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey: Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory
• UV Star Formation Rates in the Local Universe
• Galaxies on FIRE (Feedback In Realistic Environments): Stellar Feedback Explains Cosmologically Inefficient Star Formation
• Metallicity Calibrations and the Mass-Metallicity Relation for Star-Forming Galaxies
• CALIFA, the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey: I. Survey presentation
• The ages and metallicities of galaxies in the local universe
• A fundamental relation between mass, SFR and metallicity in local and high redshift galaxies
• The Mass-Metallicity Relation at z~2
• AMAZE. I. The evolution of the mass-metallicity relation at z>3
• Gas-regulation of galaxies: the evolution of the cosmic sSFR, the metallicity-mass-SFR relation and the stellar content of haloes
• The Universal Stellar Mass-Stellar Metallicity Relation for Dwarf Galaxies
• Mass models of the Milky Way
• The Third Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Metallicities of 0.3<z<1.0 Galaxies in the GOODS-North Field
• Gasoline: An adaptable implementation of TreeSPH
• The chemical composition of metal-poor emission-line galaxies in the Data Release 3 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Gusty, gaseous flows of FIRE: galactic winds in cosmological simulations with explicit stellar feedback
• Strong Nebular Line Ratios in the Spectra of z~2-3 Star-forming Galaxies: First Results from KBSS-MOSFIRE
• A systematic variation of the stellar initial mass function in early-type galaxies
• The Mass-Metallicity Relation with the Direct Method on Stacked Spectra of SDSS Galaxies
• Comparison of H-alpha and UV Star Formation Rates in the Local Volume: Systematic Discrepancies for Dwarf Galaxies
• Optical Spectroscopy and Nebular Oxygen Abundances of the Spitzer/SINGS Galaxies
• Science Objectives and Early Results of the DEEP2 Redshift Survey
• A characteristic oxygen abundance gradient in galaxy disks unveiled with CALIFA
• The Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation of Galaxies with Extended Rotation Curves and the Stellar Mass of Rotating Galaxies
• Feedback and Recycled Wind Accretion: Assembling the z=0 Galaxy Mass Function
• The Stellar Initial Mass Function in Early-Type Galaxies From Absorption Line Spectroscopy. II. Results
• The Origin and Evolution of the Galaxy Mass-Metallicity Relation
• Galaxy Evolution in Cosmological Simulations with Outflows II: Metallicities and Gas Fractions
• On Extending the Mass-Metallicity Relation of Galaxies by 2.5 Decades in Stellar Mass
• A fundamental plane for field star-forming galaxies
• The warm ionized medium in spiral galaxies
• Direct Oxygen Abundances for Low Luminosity LVL Galaxies
• The Universal Relation of Galactic Chemical Evolution: The Origin of the Mass-Metallicity Relation
• The impact of the nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio on ionized nebulae diagnostics based on [NII] emission lines
• New Strong Line Abundance Diagnostics for \HII Regions: Effects of $\kappa$-Distributed Electron Energies and New Atomic Data
• Chemical abundances in high-redshift galaxies: A powerful new emission line diagnostic
• The Mass-Metallicity relation explored with CALIFA: I. Is there a dependence on the star formation rate?
• Extragalactic chemical abundances: do HII regions and young stars tell the same story? The case of the spiral galaxy NGC 300
• The Metallicity of Galaxy Disks: Infall versus Outflow
• The MOSDEF Survey: Mass, Metallicity, and Star-formation Rate at z~2.3
• Cloud-Scale Molecular Gas Properties in 15 Nearby Galaxies
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: The Impact of Diffuse Ionized Gas on Emission-line Ratios, Interpretation of Diagnostic Diagrams, and Gas Metallicity Measurements
• How stellar feedback simultaneously regulates star formation and drives outflows
• The Mass-Metallicity and Luminosity-Metallicity Relation from DEEP2 at z ~ 0.8
• Oxygen and Nitrogen in Isolated Dwarf Irregular Galaxies
• Constraints on star-formation driven galaxy winds from the mass-metallicity relation at z=0
• Deriving model-based T${}_e$-consistent chemical abundances in ionised gaseous nebulae
• The Spatially Resolved Star Formation Law from Integral Field Spectroscopy: VIRUS-P Observations of NGC 5194
• In-N-Out: the gas cycle from dwarfs to spiral galaxies
• AGN Emission Line Diagnostics and the Mass-Metallicity Relation up to Redshift z~2: the Impact of Selection Effects and Evolution
• Eliminating Error in the Chemical Abundance Scale for Extragalactic HII Regions
• The Survey for Ionization in Neutral-Gas Galaxies: III. Diffuse, Warm Ionized Medium and Escape of Ionizing Radiation
• The Formation of Dust Lanes: Implications for Galaxy Evolution
• The role of cold gas and environment on the stellar mass - metallicity relation of nearby galaxies
• On the abundance discrepancy problem in HII regions
• A Multiwavelength Optical Emission Line Survey of Warm Ionized Gas in the Galaxy
• The FMOS-Cosmos Survey of Star-Forming Galaxies at z~1.6 II. The Mass-Metallicity Relation and the Dependence on Star Formation Rate and Dust Extinction
• Theoretical Modeling of Star-Forming Galaxies I. Emission Line Diagnostic Grids for Local and Low-Metallicity Galaxies
• The Chemical Composition of the 30 Doradus Nebula Derived from VLT Echelle Spectrophotometry
• IZI: Inferring the Gas Phase Metallicity (Z) and Ionization Parameter (q) of Ionized Nebulae using Bayesian Statistics
• The physics of the fundamental metallicity relation
• Galaxy metallicity scaling relations in the EAGLE simulations
• Chemical abundances in M31 from HII regions
• Abundance scaling in stars, nebulae and galaxies
• Spectrophotometry of Sextans A and B: Chemical Abundances of HII Regions and Planetary Nebulae
• Diffuse Ionized Gas in Three Sculptor Group Galaxies
• Low Masses and High Redshifts: The Evolution of the Mass-Metallicity Relation
• Chemical Abundances of Seven Irregular and Three Tidal Dwarf Galaxies in the M81 Group
• "Counterpart" method for abundance determinations in HII regions
• A Critical Look at the Mass-Metallicity-SFR Relation in the Local Universe. I. An Improved Analysis Framework and Confounding Systematics
• The Balmer decrement of SDSS galaxies
• Stellar Absorption Line Analysis of Local Star-Forming Galaxies: The Relation Between Stellar Mass, Metallicity, Dust Attenuation and Star Formation Rate
• Modelling Element Abundances in Semi-analytic Models of Galaxy Formation
• SDSS-V: Pioneering Panoptic Spectroscopy
• A 50 pc scale view of star formation efficiency across NGC 628
• Young stars and ionized nebulae in M83: comparing chemical abundances at high metallicity
• Faint emission lines in the Galactic H II regions M16, M20 and NGC 3603
• The Metallicities of Low Stellar Mass Galaxies and the Scatter in the Mass-Metallicity Relation
• Galaxies in the EAGLE hydrodynamical simulation and in the Durham and Munich semi-analytical models
• Carbon and oxygen in HII regions of the Magellanic Clouds: abundance discrepancy and chemical evolution
• Chemical abundances of the Galactic H II region NGC 3576 derived from VLT echelle spectrophotometry
• Metal Abundances of KISS Galaxies. IV. Galaxian Luminosity-Metallicity Relations in the Optical and Near-IR
• The chemical composition of the Orion star-forming region: II. Stars, gas, and dust: the abundance discrepancy conundrum
• The mass-metallicity and fundamental metallicity relations at z>2 using VLT and Subaru near-infrared spectroscopy of zCOSMOS galaxies
• Metal Abundances of KISS Galaxies. I. Coarse Metal Abundances and the Metallicity-Luminosity Relation
• Biases in metallicity measurements from global galaxy spectra: the effects of flux-weighting and diffuse ionized gas contamination
• The Chemical Evolution Carousel of Spiral Galaxies: Azimuthal Variations of Oxygen Abundance in NGC1365
• Metallicity Fluctuation Statistics in the Interstellar Medium and Young Stars. I. Variance and Correlation
• Coevolution of metallicity and star formation in galaxies to z=3.7: I. A fundamental plane
• Sub-Eddington Star-Forming Regions are Super-Eddington: Momentum Driven Outflows from Supersonic Turbulence
• The Metal Abundances across Cosmic Time ($\mathcal{M}\mathcal{A}\mathcal{C}\mathcal{T}$) Survey. II. Evolution of the Mass-Metallicity Relation over 8 Billion Years, using [OIII]$\lambda$4363Å-based Metallicities
• Characterizing spiral arm and interarm star formation
• The VIRUS-P Exploration of Nearby Galaxies (VENGA): Survey Design, Data Processing, and Spectral Analysis Methods
• Carbon and oxygen abundance gradients in NGC300 and M33 from optical recombination lines
• Separate ways: The Mass-Metallicity Relation does not strongly correlate with Star Formation Rate in SDSS-IV MaNGA galaxies
• Investigating The Possible Anomaly Between Nebular and Stellar Oxygen Abundances in the Dwarf Irregular Galaxy WLM
• The Origin of the Mass-Metallicity relation: an analytical approach
• The Diverse Infrared Properties of a Complete Sample of Star-Forming Dwarf Galaxies
• Tracing Outflowing Metals in Simulations of Dwarf and Spiral Galaxies
• A spectroscopic study of blue supergiant stars in the Sculptor galaxy NGC 55: chemical evolution and distance
• Abundance determination from global emission-line SDSS spectra: exploring objects with high N/O ratios
• The VIRUS-P Exploration of Nearby Galaxies (VENGA): Spatially Resolved Gas-Phase Metallicity Distributions in Barred and Unbarred Spirals
• Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): The mass-metallicity relationship
• Luminosity-Metallicity Relations for Blue Compact Dwarf Galaxies in the Optical and Near-Infrared
• Chemical Properties of Star Forming Dwarf Galaxies
• An analytical model for galaxy metallicity: What do metallicity relations tell us about star formation and outflow?
• The direct oxygen abundances of metal-rich galaxies derived from electron temperature
• Hide-and-Seek with the Fundamental Metallicity Relation
• The evolution of galaxy metallicity scaling relations in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations
• Analysis of two SMC HII Regions Considering Thermal Inhomogeneities: Implications for the Determinations of Extragalactic Chemical Abundances
• The evolution of the star formation rate function and cosmic star formation rate density of galaxies at $z\sim 1-4$
• Choirs HI Galaxy Groups: The metallicity of dwarf galaxies
• The Cocoon Nebula and its ionizing star: do stellar and nebular abundances agree?
• Kinematical Structure of the Magellanic System
• Choirs, HI Galaxy Groups: Catalogue and Detection of Star-forming Dwarf Group Members

Cited by in corpus (35)

• The MOSDEF Survey: The Evolution of the Mass-Metallicity Relation from $z=0$ to $z\sim 3.3$
• Spatially-Resolved Spectroscopic Properties of Low-Redshift Star-Forming Galaxies
• Mapping metallicity variations across nearby galaxy disks
• SDSS IV MaNGA -- Metallicity and ionisation parameter in local star-forming galaxies from Bayesian fitting to photoionisation models
• Evolution of the Mass-Metallicity Relation from Redshift $z\approx 8$ to the Local Universe
• Diffuse ionized gas and its effects on nebular metallicity estimates of star-forming galaxies
• On the origin of the mass-metallicity gradient relation in the local Universe
• The high redshift SFR-M* relation is sensitive to the employed star formation rate and stellar mass indicators: Towards addressing the tension between observations and simulations
• Astraeus V: The emergence and evolution of metallicity scaling relations during the Epoch of Reionization
• The specific star formation rate function at different mass scales and quenching: A comparison between cosmological models and SDSS
• GASP and MaNGA surveys shed light on the enigma of the gas metallicity gradients in disk galaxies
• An evolving and mass dependent ${\sigma }_{\text{sSFR}}$-${\mathrm{M}}_{\star }$ relation for galaxies
• GASP XXVII: Gas-phase metallicity scaling relations in disk galaxies with and without ram-pressure stripping
• Circumgalactic Pressure Profiles Indicate Precipitation-Limited Atmospheres for $M_{\ast }\sim 10^9$$-$$10^{11.5}{M}_{\odot }$
• Globular Cluster Formation from Colliding Substructure
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: the drivers of gas and stellar metallicity differences in galaxies
• DEVILS: Cosmic evolution of SED-derived metallicities and their connection to star-formation histories
• Gas-phase metallicity break radii of star-forming galaxies in IllustrisTNG
• The intrinsic SFRF and sSFRF of galaxies: comparing SDSS observation with IllustrisTNG simulation
• The observed cosmic star formation rate density has an evolution which resembles a Γ(a, bt) distribution and can be described successfully by only 2 parameters
• Which galaxy property is the best gauge of the oxygen abundance?
• Spatially Resolved Gas-phase Metallicity in FIRE-2 Dwarfs: Late-Time Evolution of Metallicity Relations in Simulations with Feedback and Mergers
• A new perspective on the stellar Mass-Metallicity Relation of quiescent galaxies from the LEGA-C survey
• Devouring the Milky Way Satellites: Modeling Dwarf Galaxies with Galacticus
• Hα Dots: Direct-Method Metal Abundances of Low-Luminosity Star-Forming Systems
• Constraining the non-gravitational scattering of baryons and dark matter with early cosmic structure formation
• Chemical abundances and deviations from the solar S/O ratio in the gas-phase ISM of galaxies based on infrared emission lines
• Evolution of dwarf galaxy observable parameters
• Gamma Analytical Modeling Evolution (GAME) I: The physical implications of deriving the stellar mass functions from z=0 to z=8
• MUSEQuBES: Physical conditions, origins, and multi-element abundances of the circumgalactic medium of an isolated, star-forming dwarf galaxy at z=0.57
• Probing possible effects of circumgalactic media on the metal content of galaxies through the mass-metallicity relationship
• NGC 147 Corroborates the Break in the Stellar Mass-Stellar Metallicity Relation for Galaxies
• A model for the emission line galaxy luminosity function and flux ratios at high-redshifts
• A deep ALMA Band 3 survey of HDFS/MUSE3D: Survey description and initial results
• Chemical evolution history of MaNGA galaxies