Bibcode
Sánchez Almeida, J.; Dalla Vecchia, C.
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 859, Issue 2, article id. 109, 17 pp. (2018).
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6
2018
Journal
Citations
21
Refereed citations
21
Description
For the same stellar mass, physically smaller star-forming galaxies are
also metal richer. What causes the relation remains unclear. The central
star-forming galaxies in the EAGLE cosmological numerical simulation
reproduce the observed trend. We use them to explore the origin of the
relation assuming that the physical mechanism responsible for the
anticorrelation between size and gas-phase metallicity is the same in
the simulated and the observed galaxies. We consider the three most
likely causes: (1) metal-poor gas inflows feeding the star formation
(SF) process, (2) metal-rich gas outflows particularly efficient in
shallow gravitational potentials, and (3) enhanced efficiency of the SF
process in compact galaxies. Outflows (cause 2) and enhanced SF
efficiency (cause 3) can be discarded. Metal-poor gas inflows (cause 1)
produce the correlation in the simulated galaxies. Galaxies grow in size
with time, so those that receive gas later are both metal poorer and
larger, giving rise to the observed anticorrelation. As expected within
this explanation, larger galaxies have younger stellar populations. We
explore the variation with redshift of the relation, which is maintained
up to, at least, redshift 8.
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