The Impact of Bars, Spirals and Bulge-Size on Gas-Phase Metallicity Gradients in MaNGA Galaxies

Abstract

As galaxies evolve over time, the orbits of their constituent stars are expected to change in size and shape, moving stars away from their birth radius. Radial gas flows are also expected. Spiral arms and bars in galaxies are predicted to help drive this radial relocation, which may be possible to trace observationally via a flattening of metallicity gradients. We use data from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey, part of the fourth phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS-IV), to look for correlations of the steepness of gas-phase metallicity gradients with various galaxy morphological features (e.g. presence and pitch angle of spiral arms, presence of a large scale bar, bulge size). We select from MaNGA a sample of star forming galaxies for which gas phase metallicity trends can be measured, and use morphologies from Galaxy Zoo. We observe that at fixed galaxy mass (1) the presence of spiral structure correlates with steeper gas phase metallicity gradients; (2) spiral galaxies with larger bulges have both higher gas-phase metallicities and shallower gradients; (3) there is no observable difference with azimuthally averaged radial gradients between barred and unbarred spirals and (4) there is no observable difference in gradient between tight and loosely wound spirals, but looser wound spirals have lower average gas-phase metallicity values at fixed mass. We discuss the possible implications of these observational results.

23 pages, 16 figures

References in corpus (38)

• The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package
• The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The Host Galaxies and Classification of Active Galactic Nuclei
• The propagation of uncertainties in stellar population synthesis modeling I: The relevance of uncertain aspects of stellar evolution and the IMF to the derived physical properties of galaxies
• Overview of the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey: Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory
• An Analysis of the Shapes of Interstellar Extinction Curves. V. The IR-Through-UV Curve Morphology
• Primordial Nucleosynthesis in the Precision Cosmology Era
• Understanding Galaxy Evolution through Emission Lines
• The MaNGA Integral Field Unit Fiber Feed System for the Sloan 2.5 m Telescope
• Star formation efficiency in galaxy interactions and mergers: a statistical study
• The SDSS-IV MaNGA Sample: Design, Optimization, and Usage Considerations
• SDSS-IV MaNGA IFS Galaxy Survey --- Survey Design, Execution, and Initial Data Quality
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: The Impact of Diffuse Ionized Gas on Emission-line Ratios, Interpretation of Diagnostic Diagrams, and Gas Metallicity Measurements
• Star formation sustained by gas accretion
• Catalogues of isolated galaxies, isolated pairs, and isolated triplets in the local Universe
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: pyPipe3D analysis release for 10,000 galaxies
• Galaxy Zoo: comparing the demographics of spiral arm number and a new method for correcting redshift bias
• The mass-metallicity relation of interacting galaxies
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: Radial Gradients in Stellar Population Properties of Early-Type and Late-Type Galaxies
• 3-D gas-phase elemental abundances across the formation histories of Milky Way-mass galaxies in the FIRE simulations: initial conditions for chemical tagging
• Galaxy Zoo and SpArcFiRe: Constraints on spiral arm formation mechanisms from spiral arm number and pitch angles
• The dependence of oxygen and nitrogen abundances on stellar mass from the CALIFA survey
• Galaxy Zoo: Unwinding the Winding Problem - Observations of Spiral Bulge Prominence and Arm Pitch Angles Suggest Local Spiral Galaxies are Winding
• Constraints on Radial Migration in Spiral Galaxies I. Analytic Criterion for Capture at Corotation
• Chemical Cartography with LAMOST and Gaia Reveal Azimuthal and Spiral Structure in the Galactic Disk
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: Stellar Population Gradients Within Barred Galaxies
• Bar effect on gas-phase abundance gradients. I. Data sample and chemical abundances
• GASP and MaNGA surveys shed light on the enigma of the gas metallicity gradients in disk galaxies
• The impact of early massive mergers on the chemical evolution of Milky Way-like galaxies: insights from NIHAO-UHD simulations
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: drivers of stellar metallicity in nearby galaxies
• Bar effect on gas-phase abundance gradients. II. Luminosity-dependent flattening
• Metallicity Gradient of Barred Galaxies with TYPHOON
• Spiral Arms are Metal Freeways: Azimuthal Gas-Phase Metallicity Variations in Simulated Cosmological Zoom-in Flocculent Disks
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: galaxy gas-phase metallicity gradients vary across the mass-size plane
• Gas metallicity distributions in SDSS-IV MaNGA galaxies: what drives gradients and local trends?
• The Non-Axisymmetric Influence: Radius and Angle-Dependent Trends in a Barred Galaxy
• Conversions between gas-phase metallicities in MaNGA
• xCOLDGASS and xGASS: Radial metallicity gradients and global properties on the star-forming main sequence

Cited by in corpus (2)

• The ALPINE-CRISTAL-JWST Survey: Gas-phase abundance gradients of main sequence star-forming galaxies and their kinematics at $4<z<6$
• The impact of bars on the properties of HII regions in the TIMER survey