On the effective oxygen yield in the disks of spiral galaxies

TL;DR

This study investigates how gas inflow and outflow affect the oxygen yield in spiral galaxy disks by analyzing radial abundance profiles, revealing correlations with galaxy mass and dark halo properties to understand chemical evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze the effective oxygen yield in spiral galaxies and uncovers its relation to galaxy mass and dark halo characteristics, highlighting the role of gas accretion.

Findings

Effective yield increases with radius in most galaxies.

Maximal effective yield anti-correlates with galaxy and dark halo mass.

Radial abundance gradients tend to be shallower in galaxies with lighter dark matter halos.

Abstract

The factors influencing chemical evolution of galaxies are poorly understood. Both gas inflow and gas outflow reduce a gas-phase abundance of heavy elements (metallicity) whereas the ongoing star formation continuously increases it. To exclude the stellar nucleosynthesis from consideration, we analyze for the sample of 14 spiral galaxies the radial distribution of the effective yield of oxygen $y_{eff}$, which would be identical to the true stellar yield (per stellar generation) $y_o$ if the evolution followed the closed box model. As the initial data for gas-phase abundance we used the O/H radial profiles from Moustakas, Kennicutt, Tremonti et al. (2010), based on two different calibrations (Pilyugin & Thuan 2005 (PT2005) and Kobulnicky & Kewley 2004 (KK2004) methods). In most of galaxies with the PT2005 calibration, which we consider as a preferred one, the yield $y_{eff}$ in the main disk ($R \ge 0.2~R_{25}$, where $R_{25}$ is the optical radius) increases with radius, remaining lower than the empirically found true stellar yield $y_o$. This may indicate the inflow of low-enriched gas predominantly to the inner disk regions, which reduces $y_{eff}$. We show that the maximal values of the effective yield in the main disks of galaxies, $y_{eff,max}$, anti-correlate with the total mass of galaxies and with the mass of their dark halo enclosed within $R_{25}$. It allows to propose the higher role of gas accretion for galaxies with massive halos. We also found that the radial gradient of oxygen abundance normalized to $R_{25}$ has a tendency to be shallower in the systems with lower dark halo to stellar mass ratio within the optical radius, which, if confirmed, gives evidences of the effective radial mixing of gas in galaxies with the relatively light dark matter halo.