English

Oxygen abundance in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Astrophysics 2009-11-19 v1

Abstract

We present two samples of \hii\hii galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic observations data release 3. The electron temperatures(TeT_e) of 225 galaxies are calculated with the photoionized \hii\hii model and TeT_e of 3997 galaxies are calculated with an empirical method. The oxygen abundances from the TeT_e methods of the two samples are determined reliably. The oxygen abundances from a strong line metallicity indicator, such as R23R_{23}, PP, N2N2, and O3N2O3N2, are also calculated. We compared oxygen abundances of \hii\hii galaxies obtained with the TeT_e method, R23R_{23} method, PP method, N2N2 method, and O3N2O3N2method. The oxygen abundances derived with the TeT_e method are systematically lower by \sim0.2 dex than those derived with the R23R_{23} method, consistent with previous studies based on \hii\hii region samples. No clear offset for oxygen abundance was found between TeT_e metallicity and PP, N2N2 and O3N2O3N2 metallicity. When we studied the relation between N/O and O/H, we found that in the metallicity regime of \zoh>7.95\zoh > 7.95, the large scatter of the relation can be explained by the contribution of small mass stars to the production of nitrogen. In the high metallicity regime, \zoh>8.2\zoh > 8.2, nitrogen is primarily a secondary element produced by stars of all masses.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0603255,
  title  = {Oxygen abundance in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey},
  author = {F. Shi and X. Kong and F. Z. Cheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0603255},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

7 pages, 3 figures. A&A accepted