Oral Presentation
Investigation of Mass-Metallicity Relation (MZR) in SDSS-MaNGA Galaxy Pairs
Presenter: Kiyoaki Christopher Omori (Nagoya University)
Galaxy interactions and mergers are a fundamental process that take place during galaxy evolution, however, despite its importance, our understanding of the process is far from complete. Investigating the relationship between galaxy physical properties in interacting galaxies can give us an avenue to enrich our understanding of the interaction process, which in turn will further our understanding of galaxy evolution. One such relationship is one between the stellar mass (M∗) and gas phase metallicity of a galaxy, known as the mass-metallicity relation (MZR; Lequeux et al. 1979). This relationship indicates that metallicity increases with increasing stellar mass. Galaxy interactions and mergers are known to dilute the gas phase metallicity in central regions of galaxies. During a galaxy interaction, lower metallicity gas associated with the interaction inflows towards the galaxy cores, lowering the metallicity in the nuclear region, and as a result interacting galaxies show a dilution from the MZR. In this work, we studied the spatially resolved MZR of interacting galaxies from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO(MaNGA; Bundy et al. 2015) catalogue to study the effect of interactions on the MZR at a local scale. We find a bimodality in distribution for spaxels in the circumnuclear regions of galaxies. In particular, we find that the core regions of galaxies belonging to close galaxy pairs show an offset below the MZR curve found for the entire MaNGA sample, whereas the core regions for more distant galaxy pairs are closer to the relation. We will discuss these results and other findings.
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