The Mass-Metallicity and Luminosity-Metallicity Relations from DEEP2 at z ~ 0.8

We present the mass-metallicity (MZ) and luminosity-metallicity (LZ) relations at z ~ 0.8 from ~1350 galaxies in the Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe 2 survey. We determine stellar masses by fitting the spectral energy distribution inferred from photometry with current stellar population synthe...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astrophysical journal 2011-04, Vol.730 (2), p.137-jQuery1323909983489='48'
Main Authors: Zahid, H. J, Kewley, L. J, Bresolin, F
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomy
ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
Earth, ocean, space
ENERGY SPECTRA
EVOLUTION
Exact sciences and technology
GALACTIC EVOLUTION
GALAXIES
LUMINOSITY
MASS
OPTICAL PROPERTIES
PHOTOMETRY
PHYSICAL PROPERTIES
SPECTRA
STARS
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We present the mass-metallicity (MZ) and luminosity-metallicity (LZ) relations at z ~ 0.8 from ~1350 galaxies in the Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe 2 survey. We determine stellar masses by fitting the spectral energy distribution inferred from photometry with current stellar population synthesis models. This work raises the number of galaxies with metallicities at z ~0.8 by more than an order of magnitude. We investigate the evolution in the MZ and LZ relations in comparison with local MZ and LZ relations determined in a consistent manner using ~2,000 galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We show that high stellar mass galaxies (M ~ 1010.6 M ) at z ~0.8 have attained the chemical enrichment seen in the local universe, while lower stellar mass galaxies (M ~ 109.2 M ) at z ~0.8 have lower metallicities ( Delta *Dlog(O/H) ~ 0.15 dex) than galaxies at the same stellar mass in the local universe. We find that the LZ relation evolves in both metallicity and B-band luminosity between z ~0.8 and z ~ 0, with the B-band luminosity evolving as a function of stellar mass. We emphasize that the B-band luminosity should not be used as a proxy for stellar mass in chemical evolution studies of star-forming galaxies. Our study shows that both the metallicity evolution and the B-band luminosity evolution for emission-line galaxies between the epochs are a function of stellar mass, consistent with the cosmic downsizing scenario of galaxy evolution.
ISSN:0004-637X
1538-4357
DOI:10.1088/0004-637X/730/2/137