The Metal Content of Resolved Galaxies

TL;DR

This study provides a uniform analysis of metallicities in over 500 nearby galaxies, revealing a clear luminosity-metallicity relation and differences based on galaxy type.

Contribution

It offers the first homogeneous metallicity measurements for a large sample of resolved galaxies using Hubble data, refining the understanding of galaxy chemical properties.

Findings

Most galaxies are metal-poor with [Fe/H] around -1.89 dex.

A strong luminosity-metallicity relation is established across galaxy types.

Early-type dwarf spheroidals have higher metallicities than late-type dwarf irregulars.

Abstract

We present a homogeneous metallicity analysis of old stellar populations in Local Volume (LV) galaxies using data from the CMDs/TRGB catalog of the Extragalactic Distance Database (EDD; http://edd.ifa.hawaii.edu), which provides uniformly measured TRGB distances and PSF photometry for resolved stars in over 500 nearby galaxies observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. We apply the calibration of Lee et al.(1993) to estimate the mean metallicity [Fe/H] from the (V-I) color of the red giant branch (RGB) at M_I = -3.5 mag obtaining reliable measurements for 334 galaxies out of an initial set of 558. The RGB colors were derived by locating the maximum stellar density in the (M_I, (V-I)) diagram, smoothed with a Gaussian kernel and refined via Monte Carlo simulations (500-1000 realizations), yielding typical uncertainties of about 0.03 mag. Our results show that most galaxies lie within the color range (V-I) = 1.22-1.74 of the original calibration, corresponding to metal-poor systems typical of dwarfs, with the overall metallicity distribution peaking at [Fe/H] = -1.89+-0.03 dex. We find a pronounced luminosity-metallicity relation across a wide magnitude range, from faint dwarfs (M_B > -7) mag to giant galaxies (M_B < -18), described by the regression [Fe/H] = -2.6- 0.075M_B. Both dwarf and giant galaxies follow the same relation, though ACS fields for giants often sample outer, more metal-poor regions. Morphologically, early-type dwarf spheroidals exhibit systematically higher mean metallicities than late-type dwarf irregulars.