ISM metallicity variations across spiral arms in disk galaxies: the impact of local enrichment and gas migration in the presence of radial metallicity gradient

TL;DR

This study uses chemodynamical simulations to analyze how gas migration and local enrichment influence metallicity variations in the ISM of spiral galaxies, highlighting the importance of radial gradients.

Contribution

It demonstrates that radial metallicity gradients are crucial for azimuthal metallicity variations, while local enrichment alone has limited impact.

Findings

Metallicity scatter of 0.04-0.06 dex at fixed galactocentric distance

Spiral-like metallicity patterns are more prominent with radial gradients

Residual metallicity variations are linked to star formation and gas kinematics

Abstract

Chemical abundance variations in the ISM provide important information about the galactic evolution, star-formation and enrichment histories. Recent observations of disk galaxies suggest that if large-scale azimuthal metallicity variations appear in the ISM, they are linked to the spiral arms. In this work, using a set of chemodynamical simulations of the Milky Way-like spiral galaxies, we quantify the impact of gas radial motions~(migration) in the presence of a pre-existing radial metallicity gradient and the local ISM enrichment on both global and local variations of the mean ISM metallicity in the vicinity of the spiral arms. In all the models, we find the scatter of the gas metallicity of \approx0.04-0.06 dex at a given galactocentric distance. On large scales, we observe the presence of spiral-like metallicity patterns in the ISM which are more prominent in models with the radial metallicity gradient. However, in our simulations, the morphology of the large-scale ISM metallicity distributions significantly differs from the spiral arms structure in stellar/gas components resulting in both positive and negative residual~(after subtraction of the radial gradient) metallicity trends along spiral arms. We discuss the correlations of the residual ISM metallicity values with the star formation rate, gas kinematics and offset to the spiral arms, concluding that the presence of a radial metallicity gradient is essential for the azimuthal variations of metallicity. At the same time, the local enrichment alone is unlikely to drive systematic variations of the metallicity across the spirals.