Galaxy gas flows inferred from a detailed, spatially resolved metal budget

TL;DR

This study uses detailed spatially resolved metallicity data from galaxy NGC 628 to infer the history of gas outflows and metal loss, revealing significant metal loss and the importance of outflows in galaxy evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a metal budget approach to estimate average outflow rates over a galaxy's lifetime, complementing gas kinematic studies.

Findings

Approximately 50% of metals lost in the galaxy disc.

Higher metal loss (~70%) in the bulge compared to the outer disc.

Average outflow loading factor around unity.

Abstract

We use the most extensive integral field spectroscopic map of a local galaxy, NGC 628, combined with gas and stellar mass surface density maps, to study the distribution of metals in this galaxy out to 3 effective radii ($\rm R_e$). At each galactocentric distance, we compute the metal budget and thus constrain the mass of metals lost. We find that in the disc about 50% of the metals have been lost throughout the lifetime of the galaxy. The fraction of metals lost is higher in the bulge ($\sim$70%) and decreases towards the outer disc ($\rm \sim 3 \ R_e$). In contrast to studies based on the gas kinematics, which are only sensitive to ongoing outflow events, our metal budget analysis enables us to infer the average outflow rate during the galaxy lifetime. By using simple physically motivated models of chemical evolution we can fit the observed metal budget at most radii with an average outflow loading factor of order unity, thus clearly demonstrating the importance of outflows in the evolution of disc galaxies of this mass range ($\rm log(M_\star/M_\odot) \sim 10)$. The observed gas phase metallicity is higher than expected from the metal budget and suggests late-time accretion of enriched gas, likely raining onto the disc from the metal-enriched halo.