Aligned and misaligned metallicity gradients in young stars and star-forming regions in the EAGLE discs

TL;DR

This study uses the EAGLE simulation to analyze metallicity gradients in young stars and star-forming gas, revealing how their alignment indicates different recent evolutionary paths of disc galaxies.

Contribution

It introduces a classification of galaxies based on metallicity gradient signs and links these patterns to specific evolutionary processes over the past 2 Gyr.

Findings

Different gradient alignments correspond to distinct evolutionary histories.

Inside-out growth is associated with negative gradients in both components.

Feedback-driven disruption and gradient recovery are linked to positive or mixed gradients.

Abstract

Disc galaxies exhibit radial metallicity gradients in both their stellar and gaseous components. The star-forming gas (SFG) in HII regions and young stars (YSs) trace the recent evolutionary history of the galaxy. We aim to assess the extent to which the joint analysis of metallicity gradient alignment in YSs and SFG can constrain the recent evolutionary history of galaxies. Using the high-resolution run of the EAGLE project, we derived radial, azimuthally averaged oxygen abundance profiles for YSs (age < 2 Gyr) and SFG and measured their gradients as the slopes of linear fits to these profiles. We classified galaxies into four groups based on the signs (N for negative and P for positive) of the slopes: NN, NP, PP, and PN (the first letter is for YSs and the second for SFG). We found that galaxies with NN, NP, PP, and PN combinations of metallicity profiles reflect different evolutionary paths over the past ~ 2 Gyr. NN galaxies exhibit sustained inside-out growth accompanied by high star formation efficiency, whereas NP and PP systems show evidence of recent or ongoing feedback-driven disruption, with PP galaxies likely being predominantly shaped by supernova feedback. PN galaxies, by contrast, show evidence of past violent events followed by gradient recovery, highlighting the interplay between inflows, feedback, and gas cooling in shaping metallicity distributions. The degree of alignment between the stellar and gas metallicity gradients provides a way to time the occurrence of significant events in the evolutionary history of galaxies, which contribute through a combination of gas inflows, star formation triggering, and metal mixing. They could also serve as probes of sub-grid physics when observations provide suitable comparison datasets. [Abridged]