MASCOT: Molecular gas depletion times and metallicity gradients -- evidence for feedback in quenching active galaxies

Abstract

We present results from the first public data release of the MaNGA-ARO Survey of CO Targets (MASCOT), focussing our study on galaxies whose star-formation rates and stellar masses place them below the ridge of the star-forming Main Sequence. In optically-selected type 2 AGN/LINERs/Composites, we find an empirical relation between gas-phase metallicity gradients $\nabla Z$ and global molecular gas depletion times $t_{\mathrm{dep}}=M_{H_2}$/SFR with "more quenched" systems showing flatter/positive gradients. Our results are based on the O3N2 metallicity diagnostic (applied to star-forming regions within a given galaxy) which was recently suggested to also be robust against emission by diffuse ionised gas (DIG) and low-ionisation nuclear emission regions (LINERs). We conduct a systematic investigation into possible drivers of the observed $\nabla Z$ - $t_{\mathrm{dep}}$ relation (ouflows, gas accretion, in-situ star formation, mergers, and morphology). We find a strong relation between $\nabla Z$ or $t_{\mathrm{dep}}$ and centralised outflow strength traced by the [OIII] velocity broadening. We also find signatures of suppressed star-formation in the outskirts in AGN-like galaxies with long depletion times and an enhancement of metals in the outer regions. We find no evidence of inflows impacting the metallicity gradients, and none of our results are found to be significantly affected by merger activity or morphology. We thus conclude that the observed $\nabla Z$ - $t_{\mathrm{dep}}$ relation may stem from a combination of metal redistribution via weak feedback, and a connection to in-situ star formation via a resolved mass-metallicity-SFR relation.

23 pages including appendix, 12 figures (+6 in the appendix), accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (49)

• Star Formation in AEGIS Field Galaxies since z=1.1 : The Dominance of Gradually Declining Star Formation, and the Main Sequence of Star-Forming Galaxies
• Overview of the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey: Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory
• The Circumgalactic Medium
• Evolutionary Stellar Population Synthesis with MILES. Part I: The Base Models and a New Line Index System
• xCOLD GASS: the complete IRAM-30m legacy survey of molecular gas for galaxy evolution studies
• Understanding Galaxy Evolution through Emission Lines
• Galaxy Merger Morphologies and Time-Scales from Simulations of Equal-Mass Gas-Rich Disc Mergers
• An Objective Definition for the Main Sequence of Star-Forming Galaxies
• The SDSS-IV MaNGA Sample: Design, Optimization, and Usage Considerations
• SDSS-IV MaNGA IFS Galaxy Survey --- Survey Design, Execution, and Initial Data Quality
• Clues to the Origin of the Mass-Metallicity Relation: Dependence on Star Formation Rate and Galaxy Size
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: The Impact of Diffuse Ionized Gas on Emission-line Ratios, Interpretation of Diagnostic Diagrams, and Gas Metallicity Measurements
• The cold interstellar medium of galaxies in the Local Universe
• Green Valley Galaxies
• Diffuse ionized gas in galaxies across the Hubble sequence at the CALIFA resolution
• How do central and satellite galaxies quench? -- Insights from spatially resolved spectroscopy in the MaNGA survey
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: environmental dependence of stellar age and metallicity gradients in nearby galaxies
• SDSS-IV DR17: Final Release of MaNGA PyMorph Photometric and Deep Learning Morphological Catalogs
• Do galaxy global relationships emerge from local ones? The SDSS IV MaNGA surface mass density-metallicity relation
• The ALMaQUEST Survey: The molecular gas main sequence and the origin of the star forming main sequence
• Gas-phase metallicity gradients of TNG50 star-forming galaxies
• Ionised gas outflow signatures in SDSS-IV MaNGA active galactic nuclei
• CLEAR: The Gas-Phase Metallicity Gradients of Star-Forming Galaxies at 0.6 < z < 2.6
• pyFIT3D and pyPipe3D -- The new version of the Integral Field Spectroscopy data analysis pipeline
• Metallicity calibrations for diffuse ionised gas and low ionisation emission regions
• xGASS: Cold gas content and quenching in galaxies below the star forming main sequence
• The ALMaQUEST Survey IX: The nature of the resolved star forming main sequence
• The mass-metallicity relations for gas and stars in star-forming galaxies: strong outflow vs variable IMF
• A Catalog of 406 AGNs in MaNGA: A Connection between Radio-mode AGN and Star Formation Quenching
• Rejuvenation in $z\sim 0.8$ quiescent galaxies in LEGA-C
• The EDGE-CALIFA survey: The local and global relations between ${\Sigma }_{\ast }$ , ${\Sigma }_{SFR}$ and ${\Sigma }_{mol}$ that regulate star-formation
• ALMaQUEST -- IV. The ALMA-MaNGA QUEnching and STar formation (ALMaQUEST) Survey
• Resolved galaxy scaling relations in the EAGLE simulation: star formation, metallicity and stellar mass on kpc scales
• From global to spatially resolved in low-redshift galaxies
• The EDGE-CALIFA survey: exploring the role of the molecular gas on the galaxy star formation quenching
• Incidence, scaling relations and physical conditions of ionised gas outflows in MaNGA
• The ALMaQUEST Survey: II. What drives central starbursts at z~0?
• GASP and MaNGA surveys shed light on the enigma of the gas metallicity gradients in disk galaxies
• ALMaQUEST -- VII: Star Formation Scaling Relations of Green Valley Galaxies
• Accurate Identification of Galaxy Mergers with Stellar Kinematics
• The fundamental metallicity relation emerges from the local anti-correlation between star formation rate and gas-phase metallicity existing in disk galaxies
• A new empirical method to estimate the molecular gas mass in galaxies
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: galaxy gas-phase metallicity gradients vary across the mass-size plane
• How well do local relations predict gas-phase metallicity gradients? Results from SDSS-IV MaNGA
• The role of gas kinematics in setting metallicity gradients at high redshift
• A search for ionised gas outflows in an Halpha imaging atlas of nearby LINERs
• Which galaxy property is the best gauge of the oxygen abundance?
• Chemical abundance of LINER galaxies -- Metallicity calibrations based on SDSS-IV MaNGA
• xCOLDGASS and xGASS: Radial metallicity gradients and global properties on the star-forming main sequence

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Feedback from low-to-moderate luminosity radio-AGN with MaNGA