Spatially Resolved Metal Loss from M31

Abstract

Abstract As galaxies evolve, they must enrich and exchange gas with the surrounding medium, but the timing of these processes and how much gas is involved remain poorly understood. In this work, we leverage metals as tracers of past gas flows to constrain the history of metal ejection and redistribution in M31. This roughly L* galaxy is a unique case where spatially resolved measurements of the gas-phase and stellar metallicity, dust extinction, and neutral interstellar gas content are all available, enabling a census of the current metal mass. We combine spatially resolved star formation histories from the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury survey with a metal production model to calculate the history of metal production in M31. We find that 1.8 × 109 M ⊙ of metals, or 62% of the metal mass formed within r < 19 kpc, is missing from the disk in our fiducial model, implying that the M31 disk has experienced significant gaseous outflows over its lifetime. Under a conservative range of model assumptions, we find that between 3% and 88% of metals have been lost (1.9 × 107–6.4 × 109 M ⊙), which means that metals are missing even when all model parameters are chosen to favor metal retention. We show that the missing metal mass could be harbored in the circumgalactic medium of M31 if the majority of the metals reside in a hot gas phase. Finally, we find that some metal mass produced in the past 1.5 Gyr in the central ∼5 kpc has likely been redistributed to larger radii within the disk.