The star-formation history of low-mass disk galaxies: a case study of NGC\,300

TL;DR

This study models the chemical evolution of NGC300, a low-mass, bulge-less galaxy, to understand its star formation history and compare it with similar galaxies, revealing insights into its growth and environmental effects.

Contribution

It introduces a simple chemical evolution model tailored for NGC300, linking its star formation history with observed properties and highlighting the role of environment in its evolution.

Findings

Model reproduces observed radial profiles and global properties.

NGC300 experienced rapid disk growth.

Older stellar population compared to M33.

Abstract

Since NGC300 is a bulge-less, isolated low-mass galaxy and has not experienced radial migration during its evolution history, it can be treated as an ideal laboratory to test simple galactic chemical evolution models. By assuming its disk forms gradually from continuous accretion of primordial gas and including the gas-outflow process, we construct a simple chemical evolution model for NGC300 to build a bridge between its SFH and its observed data, especially the present-day radial profiles and global observed properties (e.g., cold gas mass, star-formation rate and metallicity). By means of comparing the model predictions with the corresponding observations, we adopt the classical $\chi^{2}$ methodology to find out the best combination of free parameters $a$, $b$ and $b_{\rm out}$. Our results show that, by assuming an inside-out formation scenario and an appropriate outflow rate, our model reproduces well most of the present-day observational values, not only the radial profiles but also the global observational data for the NGC300 disk. Our results suggest that NGC300 may experience a rapid growth of its disk. Through comparing the best-fitting model predicted SFH of NGC300 with that of M33, we find that the mean stellar age of NGC300 is older than that of M33 and there is a lack of primordial gas infall onto the disk of NGC300 recently. Our results also imply that the local environment may paly a key role in the secular evolution of NGC300.