Trading oxygen for iron II. Oxygen- versus iron-dependent cosmic star formation history

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework to separately analyze the cosmic evolution of oxygen and iron abundances in galaxies, revealing that most star formation occurs at non-solar O/Fe ratios and impacting interpretations of galaxy spectra and transient events.

Contribution

It introduces an observationally-motivated method to derive the cosmic star formation history based on separate O and Fe abundances, highlighting the rarity of solar O/Fe ratios in star formation.

Findings

70% of stellar mass forms at non-solar O/Fe ratios

Cosmic metallicity in [Fe/H] is lower than in [O/H] by up to a factor of 3

Results validated against gamma-ray burst data

Abstract

Due to their different nucleosynthetic origin, a stellar population produces oxygen (O) and iron (Fe) on different timescales and their relative abundance can deviate strongly from solar. Galaxy formation models should treat these elements separately, as they play a distinct role in shaping physical phenomena. For example, oxygen mainly sets the gas cooling rate, while the iron abundance sets stellar atmosphere opacities impacting stellar evolution, spectra and feedback. Observations of star-forming galaxies usually only constrain gas-phase oxygen abundance, vastly limiting our capabilities of separating the cosmic evolution of oxygen and iron. Here, we present an observationally-motivated framework to scale the cosmic evolution of O and Fe abundances. We apply the relation between the alpha-enhancement and galaxies' specific star formation rate ([O/Fe]-sSFR; Chruslinska et al. 2024) to derive the Fe and O-dependent cosmic star formation history (cSFH). We find that star formation with near-solar O/Fe is rare: at least 70% of the integrated cosmic stellar mass forms at non-solar O/Fe. The cosmic average metallicity is generally lower in [Fe/H] than in [O/H] (by up to a factor 3), with the offset increasing from redshifts z=0 to z~3 and then approaching the core-collapse O/Fe ratio. We validate our results against samples that probe the Fe-dependent cSFH in different regimes such as absorption-derived <[Fe/H]> from long gamma-ray bursts. Our results impact the interpretations of stellar and galaxy spectra and the predicted rates of transients, especially those linked to metal-poor progenitors (e.g., black hole mergers).