How Environment Affects Galaxy Metallicity through Stripping and Formation History: Lessons from the Illustris Simulation

TL;DR

This study uses the Illustris simulation to disentangle how environment influences galaxy metallicity, revealing that formation history and internal metallicity profiles are key factors, with minimal impact from circumgalactic metallicity.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of metallicity-environment correlations, highlighting the roles of formation history and internal metallicity distribution, using matched galaxy samples in a cosmological simulation.

Findings

Approximately one-third of the metallicity-environment correlation is due to formation history differences.

Most of the remaining correlation is caused by the concentration of star-forming disks in satellites.

Radially averaged metallicity shows environment independence when formation history is matched.

Abstract

Recent studies have found higher galaxy metallicities in richer environments. It is not yet clear, however, whether metallicity-environment dependencies are merely an indirect consequence of environmentally dependent formation histories, or of environment related processes directly affecting metallicity. Here, we present a first detailed study of metallicity-environment correlations in a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation, in particular the Illustris simulation. Illustris galaxies display similar relations to those observed. Utilizing our knowledge of simulated formation histories, and leveraging the large simulation volume, we construct galaxy samples of satellites and centrals that are matched in formation histories. This allows us to find that ~1/3 of the metallicity-environment correlation is due to different formation histories in different environments. This is a combined effect of satellites (in particular, in denser environments) having on average lower z=0 star formation rates (SFRs), and of their older stellar ages, even at a given z=0 SFR. Most of the difference, ~2/3, however, is caused by the higher concentration of star-forming disks of satellite galaxies, as this biases their SFR-weighted metallicities toward their inner, more metal-rich parts. With a newly defined quantity, the 'radially averaged' metallicity, which captures the metallicity profile but is independent of the SFR profile, the metallicities of satellites and centrals become environmentally independent once they are matched in formation history. We find that circumgalactic metallicity (defined as rapidly inflowing gas around the virial radius), while sensitive to environment, has no measurable effect on the metallicity of the star-forming gas inside the galaxies.