Breaks in the Radial Oxygen Abundance and Corotation Radius of Three Spiral Galaxies

Abstract

The correlation between the breaks in the metallicity distribution and the corotation radius of spiral galaxies has been already advocated in the past and is predicted by a chemo-dynamical model of our Galaxy that effectively introduces the role of spiral arms in the star formation rate. In this work we present photometric and spectroscopic observations made with the Gemini Telescope for three of the best candidates of spiral galaxies to have the corotation inside the optical disk: IC0167, NGC1042 and NGC6907. We observed the most intense and well distributed \hii regions of these galaxies, deriving reliable galactocentric distances and Oxygen abundances by applying different statistical methods. From these results we confirm the presence of variations in the gradients of metallicity of these galaxies that are possibly correlated with the corotation resonance.