English

Dynamics and Metallicity of Far-IR Selected Galaxies

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2015-06-19 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

We present near-infrared integral field spectroscopy of ten Herschel selected galaxies at z~1.5. From detailed mapping of the Hα\alpha and [NII] emission lines we trace the dynamics, star formation rates, metallicities and also investigate gas fractions for these galaxies. For a few galaxies the distribution of star formation as traced by Hα\alpha only traces a small fraction of the stellar disc, which could be tracing recent minor merging events. The rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) continuum emission often has a distribution completely different from Hα\alpha, which warns about the use of UV-SED based star formation tracers in these systems. Our analysis of galaxy dynamics shows that minor dynamical disruptions (e.g. minor merging) are generally not enough to cause a deviation from the established 'Main Sequence' relation. Most galaxies are found to follow the fundamental metallicity relation (FMR), although with large scatter. One galaxy, (a small satellite galaxy of a massive companion) is found to deviate strongly from the FMR. This deviation is in nice agreement with the correlation recently discovered in local galaxies between gas metallicity and environment, which has been ascribed to enriched inter-galactic medium (IGM) in dense environments, and therefore suggests that here the IGM was already significantly enriched by z~1.5.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1405.3664,
  title  = {Dynamics and Metallicity of Far-IR Selected Galaxies},
  author = {R. J. Williams and R. Maiolino and P. Santini and A. Marconi and G. Cresci and F. Mannucci and D. Lutz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.3664},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

28 pages, 20 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS