SDSS-IV MaNGA: Variations in the N/O -- O/H relation bias metallicity gradient measurements

TL;DR

This study investigates how variations in nitrogen-to-oxygen ratios affect metallicity measurements in galaxy surveys, revealing significant biases in gradient estimates linked to galaxy mass and star formation efficiency.

Contribution

It demonstrates that N/O variations introduce substantial systematic uncertainties in metallicity gradients, highlighting the need to account for these effects in galaxy chemical evolution studies.

Findings

N/O varies radially at fixed O/H and correlates with galaxy mass.

Nitrogen-dependent calibrations can bias oxygen abundance gradients by up to 40%.

Local star formation efficiency influences N/O variations.

Abstract

In this paper we use strong line calibrations of N/O and O/H in MaNGA spaxel data to explore the systematics introduced by variations in N/O on various strong-line metallicity diagnostics. We find radial variations in N/O at fixed O/H which correlate with total galaxy stellar-mass; and which can induce $\sim 40 \%$ systematic uncertainties in oxygen abundance gradients when nitrogen-dependent abundance calibrations are used. Empirically, we find that these differences are associated with variation in the local star formation efficiency, as predicted by recent chemical evolution models for galaxies, but we cannot rule out other processes such as radial migration and the accretion of passive dwarf galaxies also playing a role.