The impact of gas accretion and AGN feedback on the scatter of the mass–metallicity relation

Abstract

ABSTRACT The gas-phase metallicity of galaxies encodes important information about galaxy evolution processes, in particular star formation, feedback, outflows, and gas accretion, the relative importance of which can be extracted from systematic trends in the scatter of the mass–metallicity relation (MZR). Here, we use a sample of low-redshift (0.02 < z < 0.055) galaxies from SDSS to investigate the nature of the scatter around the MZR, the observables and physical processes causing it, and its dependence on galaxy mass. We use cold gas masses inferred from optical emission lines using the technique of Scholte & Saintonge (2023) to confirm that at fixed stellar mass, metallicity and gas mass are anticorrelated, but only for galaxies up to M* = 1010.5 M⊙. In that mass regime, we find a link between the offset of a galaxy from the MZR and halo mass, using the amplitude of the two-point correlation function as a proxy for halo mass; at fixed stellar mass, the most gas-poor galaxies reside in the most massive haloes. This observation is consistent with changes in gas accretion rates onto galaxies as a function of halo mass, with environmental effects acting on satellite galaxies also contributing. At higher stellar masses, the scatter of the MZR does no longer correlate with gas or halo mass. Instead, there is some indication of a link with AGN activity, as expected from models and simulations that metallicity is set by the interplay between gas in- and outflows, star formation, and AGN feedback, shaping the MZR and its scatter.