SDSS-IV/MaNGA: Can impulsive gaseous inflows explain steep oxygen abundance profiles \& anomalously-low-metallicity regions?

Abstract

Gaseous inflows are necessary suppliers of galaxies' star-forming fuel, but are difficult to characterize at the survey scale. We use integral-field spectroscopic measurements of gas-phase metallicity and single-dish radio measurements of total atomic gas mass to estimate the magnitude and frequency of gaseous inflows incident on star-forming galaxies. We reveal a mutual correlation between steep oxygen abundance profiles between $0.25-1.5R_e$, increased variability of metallicity between $1.25-1.75R_e$, and elevated HI content at fixed total galaxy stellar mass. Employing a simple but intuitive inflow model, we find that galaxies with total stellar mass less than $10^{10.1}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$ have local oxygen abundance profiles consistent with reinvigoration by inflows. Approximately 10-25\% of low-mass galaxies possess signatures of recent accretion, with estimated typical enhancements of approximately 10-90\% in local gas mass surface density. Higher-mass galaxies have limited evidence for such inflows. The large diversity of HI mass implies that inflow-associated gas ought to reside far from the star-forming disk. We therefore propose that a combination of high HI mass, steep metallicity profile between $0.25-1.5R_e$, and wide metallicity distribution function between $1.25-1.75R_e$ be employed to target possible hosts of inflowing gas for high-resolution radio follow-up.

References in corpus (25)

• The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Overview of the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey: Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory
• Simulating galaxy formation with black hole driven thermal and kinetic feedback
• The MaNGA Integral Field Unit Fiber Feed System for the Sloan 2.5 m Telescope
• The Atomic to Molecular Transition in Galaxies. II: HI and H_2 Column Densities
• The Data Reduction Pipeline for the SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU Galaxy Survey
• The SDSS-IV MaNGA Sample: Design, Optimization, and Usage Considerations
• SDSS-IV MaNGA IFS Galaxy Survey --- Survey Design, Execution, and Initial Data Quality
• Reconstructing the star formation history of the Milky Way disc(s) from chemical abundances
• Mapping metallicity variations across nearby galaxy disks
• Diffuse ionized gas in galaxies across the Hubble sequence at the CALIFA resolution
• IZI: Inferring the Gas Phase Metallicity (Z) and Ionization Parameter (q) of Ionized Nebulae using Bayesian Statistics
• Catalogues of isolated galaxies, isolated pairs, and isolated triplets in the local Universe
• Are galactic star formation and quenching governed by local, global or environmental phenomena?
• Radial distribution of dust, stars, gas, and star-formation rate in DustPedia face-on galaxies
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: What Shapes The Distribution Of Metals In Galaxies? Exploring The Roles Of The Local Gas Fraction And Escape Velocity
• The Chemical Evolution Carousel of Spiral Galaxies: Azimuthal Variations of Oxygen Abundance in NGC1365
• HI-MaNGA: HI Followup for the MaNGA Survey
• Missing Stellar Mass in SED Fitting: Spatially Unresolved Photometry can Underestimate Galaxy Masses
• Evidence of ongoing radial migration in NGC 6754: Azimuthal variations of the gas properties
• Nearly all Massive Quiescent Disk Galaxies have a Surprisingly Large Atomic Gas Reservoir
• Mixing and transport of metals by gravitational instability-driven turbulence in galactic discs
• Anomalously low metallicity regions in MaNGA star-forming galaxies: Accretion Caught in Action?
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: Variations in the N/O -- O/H relation bias metallicity gradient measurements
• The fundamental metallicity relation emerges from the local anti-correlation between star formation rate and gas-phase metallicity existing in disk galaxies

Cited by in corpus (3)

• A geostatistical analysis of multiscale metallicity variations in galaxies [I]: Introduction and comparison of high-resolution metallicity maps to an analytic metal transport model
• MaNGA 8313-1901: gas accretion observed in a blue compact dwarf galaxy?
• The ALMaQUEST Survey XV: The Dependence of the Molecular-to-Atomic Gas Ratios on Resolved Optical Diagnostics