Kavli Affiliate: Yingjie Peng
| First 5 Authors: Chengyu Ma, Kai Wang, Enci Wang, Yingjie Peng, Haochen Jiang
| Summary:
The gas-phase metallicity of galaxies is regulated by multiple astrophysical
processes, which makes it a crucial diagnostic of galaxy formation and
evolution. Beyond the fundamental mass-metallicity relation, a debate about the
secondary galaxy property to predict the metallicity of galaxies arises.
Motivated by this, we systematically examine the relationship between gas-phase
metallicity and other galaxy properties, i.e. star formation rate (SFR) and
galaxy size, in addition to stellar mass in both observation and simulation. We
utilize the data from the MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point
Observatory) survey and the TNG50 simulations. We find that the combination of
$M_*/R_{rm e}^beta$ with $betasim 0.6-1$ is in much stronger correlation to
the metallicity than stellar mass alone, regardless of whether the SFR is
included or not, in both observation and simulation. This indicates that galaxy
size plays a more important role in determining gas-phase metallicity of
galaxies than SFR. In addition, the TNG simulation predicts that the SFR,
although being a subdominant role, becomes increasingly important in high-$z$
universe. Finally, we speculate that SFR modulates metallicity on the temporal
dimension, synchronized with time-varying gas inflows, and galaxy size
regulates metallicity on the spatial dimension by affecting the gravitational
potential and the mass loading factor.
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