Abstract
The evolution of the content of heavy elements in galaxies, the relative chemical abundances, their spatial distribution, and how these scale with various galactic properties, provide unique information on the galactic evolutionary processes across the cosmic epochs. In recent years major progress has been made in constraining the chemical evolution of galaxies and inferring key information relevant to our understanding of the main mechanisms involved in galaxy evolution. In this review we provide an overview of these various areas. After an overview of the methods used to constrain the chemical enrichment in galaxies and their environment, we discuss the observed scaling relations between metallicity and galaxy properties, the observed relative chemical abundances, how the chemical elements are distributed within galaxies, and how these properties evolve across the cosmic epochs. We discuss how the various observational findings compare with the predictions from theoretical models and numerical cosmological simulations. Finally, we briefly discuss the open problems and the prospects for major progress in this field in the nearby future.
Highlights
The evolution of the chemical properties of stellar populations and of the interstellar and intergalactic medium across the cosmic epochs provides unique information on the evolutionary processes driving the formation and evolution of galaxies
Different chemical elements are enriched on different timescales by different populations of stars; the relative abundance of elements enables us to obtain unique constraints on the star formation history and on the late stages of the evolutions of single and multiple stars, stages which dominate the production of heavy elements
The relative chemical abundances of various elements is another major topic that, as mentioned above, provide key information, and to which we dedicate an entire major section; we cannot realistically review all chemical elements; we will mostly focus on some specific abundances ratios that are useful to constrain the star formation history and galaxy evolution, and which have been measured across large samples of galaxies
Summary
Asymptotic giant branch Active galactic nucleus Atacama Large Millimeter Array APO Galactic Evolution Experiment (SDSS, Majewski et al 2017) Broad-line region Black hole Baldwin–Phillips–Terlevich Blue supergiant stars Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field spectroscopy Area survey (Sánchez et al 2012) Core-collapse (supernovae) Charge-coupled device Collisionally-excited lines Carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars Circumgalactic medium Diffused ionized gas Damped Lyman-α system European extremely large telescope Extended narrow line region Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (Davies et al 2018) European space agency European Southern Observatory Early-type galaxy Equivalent width Fundamental metallicity relation Green peas Giant magellan telescope Gamma-ray burst Galactic Archeology with HERMES (Anglo-Australian Telescope, De Silva et al 2015) Intracluster medium Integral field unit intergalactic medium Initial mass function Infrared Interstellar medium Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency James Webb Space Telescope Lyman-α galaxies Low ionization emission line region Low ionization nuclear emission line region Lyman-limit systems Large magellanic cloud Mapping nearby galaxies at APO (Bundy et al 2015) Multi object optical and near-infrared spectrograph (ESO-VLT, Cirasuolo et al 2012). Obs., Steinmetz et al 2006) Recombination lines Red supergiant stars Semi-analytic model Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph (Galaxy Survey) (Bryant et al 2015) Sloan digital sky survey Sloan extension for galactic understanding and exploration (Yanny et al 2009) Star formation rate Specific star formation rate Square-kilometre array Supernovae Signal-to-noise ratio Supernova remnant Space Infrared Telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics (Roelfsema et al 2018) Single stellar population Thirty-Meter Telescope Ultra luminous infrared galaxy Ultraviolet Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (ESO) Very large telescope (ESO) Wide-field multi-object spectrograph for WHT (Dalton 2016) Warm–hot intergalactic medium William Herschel telescope Extremely metal poor galaxies X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission
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