Detalles de publicación
PP 016001
Gas Inflow and Metallicity Drops in Star-forming Galaxies
(1) Centro de Astrobiolog ́ıa (CSIC-INTA), Ctra de Torrejo ́n a Ajalvir, km 4, E-28850 Torrejo ́n de Ardoz, Madrid, Spain Astro-UAM,
(2) Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Unidad Asociada CSIC, E-28049 Madrid, Spain,
(3) Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, E-38205 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain,
(4) Departamento de Astrofisica, Universidad de La Laguna, E-38205 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain,
(5) Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel,
(6) IBM Research Division, T.J. Watson Research Center, 1101 Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA,
(7) Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604, USA,
(8) Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, USA
Gas inflow feeds galaxies with low metallicity gas from the cosmic web, sustaining star formation across the Hubble time. We make a connection between these inflows and metallicity inhomogeneities in star-forming galaxies, by using synthetic narrow-band images of the Halpha emission line from zoom-in AMR cosmological simulations of galaxies with stellar masses of $M \simeq 10^9 $Msun at redshifts z=2-7. In $\sim$50\% of the cases at redshifts lower than 4, the gas inflow gives rise to star-forming, Halpha-bright, off-centre clumps. Most of these clumps have gas metallicities, weighted by Halpha luminosity, lower than the metallicity in the surrounding interstellar medium by $\sim$0.3 dex, consistent with observations of chemical inhomogeneities at high and low redshifts. Due to metal mixing by shear and turbulence, these metallicity drops are dissolved in a few disc dynamical times. Therefore, they can be considered as evidence for rapid gas accretion coming from cosmological inflow of pristine gas.

