Reconciling the Stellar and Nebular Spectra of High Redshift Galaxies - INSPIRE

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Reconciling the Stellar and Nebular Spectra of High Redshift Galaxies

May 23, 2016

29 pages

Published in:

Astrophys.J. 826 (2016) 2, 159

Published: Jul 28, 2016

e-Print:

1605.07186 [astro-ph.GA]

DOI:

10.3847/0004-637X/826/2/159

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Abstract: (IOP)

We present a combined analysis of rest-frame far-UV (FUV, 1000–2000 Å) and rest-frame optical (3600–7000 Å) composite spectra formed from very deep Keck/LRIS and Keck/MOSFIRE observations of a sample of 30 star-forming galaxies with

z=2.40\pm 0.11

, selected to be broadly representative of the full KBSS-MOSFIRE spectroscopic survey. Since the same massive stars are responsible for the observed FUV continuum and for the excitation of the observed nebular emission, a self-consistent stellar population synthesis model should simultaneously match the details of the FUV stellar+nebular continuum and—when inserted as the excitation source in photoionization models—predict all observed nebular emission line ratios. We find that only models including massive star binaries, having low stellar metallicity (

{Z}_{* }/{Z}_{\odot }\simeq 0.1

) but relatively high nebular (ionized gas-phase) abundances (

{Z}_{{\rm{neb}}}/{Z}_{\odot }\simeq 0.5

), can successfully match all of the observational constraints. We show that this apparent discrepancy is naturally explained by highly super-solar O/Fe (\simeq 4\mbox{--}5\,{({\rm{O}}/\mathrm{Fe})}_{\odot }), expected for a gas whose enrichment is dominated by the products of core-collapse supernovae. While O dominates the physics of the ionized gas (and thus the nebular emission lines), Fe dominates the extreme-UV (EUV) and FUV opacity and controls the mass-loss rate from massive stars, resulting in particularly dramatic effects for massive stars in binary systems. This high nebular excitation—caused by the hard EUV spectra of Fe-poor massive stars—is much more common at high redshift

(z\gtrsim 2)

than low redshift due to systematic differences in the star formation history of typical galaxies.

Note:

29 pages, 17 figures. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

cosmology: observations
galaxies: evolution
galaxies: high-redshift
H ii regions
ISM: abundances
stars: massive

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