Azimuthal variations of oxygen abundance profiles in star-forming regions of disc galaxies in the EAGLE simulations

Abstract

The exploration of the spatial distribution of chemical abundances in star-forming regions in galactic discs provides clues to understand the complex interplay of physical processes that regulate the star formation activity and the chemical enrichment across a galaxy. We study the azimuthal variations of the normalized oxygen abundance profiles in the highest numerical resolution run of the Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments (EAGLE) Project at $z=0$. We use young stellar populations to trace the abundances of star-forming regions. Oxygen profiles are estimated along different line of sights from a centrally located observer.The mean azimuthal variation in the EAGLE discs are $\sim 0.12\pm 0.03$~dex~$R_{\mathrm{eff}}^{-1}$ for slopes and $\sim 0.12\pm 0.03$~dex for the zero points, in agreement with previous works. Metallicity gradients measured along random directions correlate with those determine by averaging over the whole discs although with a large dispersion. We find a slight trend for higher azimuthal variations in the disc components of low star-forming and bulge-dominated galaxies. We also investigate the metallicity profiles of stellar populations with higher and lower levels of enrichment than the average metallicity profiles, and we find that high star-forming region with high metallicity tend to have slightly shallower metallicity slopes compared with the overall metallicity gradient. The simulated azimuthal variations in the EAGLE discs are in global agreement with observations, although the large variety of metallicity gradients would encourage further exploration of the metal mixing in numerical simulations.

9 pages, 7 figures, Accepted MNRAS. revised version to match published version

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• The evolution of the oxygen abundance gradients in star-forming galaxies in the EAGLE simulations
• Spiral Arms are Metal Freeways: Azimuthal Gas-Phase Metallicity Variations in Simulated Cosmological Zoom-in Flocculent Disks
• The role of AGN on the structure, kinematics and evolution of ETGs in the Horizon simulations
• Exploring the outskirts of the EAGLE disc galaxies
• 3D elemental abundances of stars at formation across the histories of Milky Way-mass galaxies in the FIRE simulations
• Aligned and misaligned metallicity gradients in young stars and star-forming regions in the EAGLE discs
• The MAGIC project. III. Radial and azimuthal Galactic abundance gradients using classical Cepheids