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SDSS-IV MaNGA: Evidence for enriched accretion onto satellite galaxies in dense environments

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Authors

Schaefer, Adam L 
Tremonti, Christy 
Pace, Zachary 
Belfiore, Francesco 
Argudo-Fernandez, Maria 

Abstract

We investigate the environmental dependence of the local gas-phase metallicity in a sample of star-forming galaxies from the MaNGA survey. Satellite galaxies with stellar masses in the range 9<log⁡(M/M)<10 are found to be ∼0.05dex higher in metallicity than centrals of similar stellar mass. Within the low-mass satellite population, we find that the interstellar medium (ISM) metallicity depends most strongly on the stellar mass of the galaxy that is central to the halo, though there is no obvious difference in the metallicity gradients. At fixed total stellar mass, the satellites of high mass (M>1010.5M) centrals are ∼0.1dex more metal rich than satellites of low-mass (M<1010M) centrals, controlling for local stellar mass surface density and gas fraction. Fitting a gas-regulator model to the spaxel data, we are able to account for variations in the local gas fraction, stellar mass surface density and local escape velocity-dependent outflows. We find that the best explanation for the metallicity differences is the variation in the average metallicity of accreted gas between different environments that depends on the stellar mass of the dominant galaxies in each halo. This is interpreted as evidence for the exchange of enriched gas between galaxies in dense environments that is predicted by recent simulations.

Description

Keywords

astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.GA

Journal Title

Astrophysical Journal

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0004-637X
1538-4357

Volume Title

884

Publisher

IOP Publishing

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/M001172/1)
European Research Council (695671)