Estimating The Metallicity of Star-forming Early-type Galaxies

TL;DR

This study analyzes a large sample of star-forming early-type galaxies from SDSS, examining their star formation rates, stellar mass, and metallicity relations, and discusses how different metallicity calibrators influence measurements.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the MZ relation in star-forming ETGs and compares the effects of various metallicity calibration methods.

Findings

Higher metallicity may be due to diffuse ionized gas contamination.

A consistent SFR-stellar mass relation with a slope of ~0.74 was found.

Metallicity estimators influence the observed MZ relation.

Abstract

We derive data of 4615 star-forming early-type galaxies (ETGs), which come from cross-match of the $Galaxy~Zoo~1$ and the catalogue of the MPA-JHU emission-line measurements for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7. Our sample distributes mainly at $\rm -0.7<log(SFR[M_{\sun}yr^{-1}])<1.2$, and the median value of our SFRs is slightly higher than that shown in Davis \& Young. We display a significant trend of lower/higher stellar mass ETGs to have lower/higher SFR, and obtain our sample best fit of log(SFR)=$ (0.74\pm0.01)$log$(M_{*}/M_{\sun})-(7.64\pm0.10)$, finding the same slope as that found in Cano-D\'{i}az et al. In our star-forming ETG sample, we demonstrate clearly the correlation of the stellar mass and metallicity (MZ) relation. We find that higher metallicity measurements may be introduced by the diffuse ionized gas, when the D16, Sanch18, and Sander18 indicators are used to calibrate the metallicity of ETGs. We show the relations between SFR and 12+log(O/H) with different metallicity estimators, and suggest that their correlations may be a consequence of the SFR-stellar mass and MZ relations in ETGs.