Star-forming galaxies are predicted to lie on a fundamental plane of mass, star formation rate and \alpha-enhancement

Abstract

Observations show that star-forming galaxies reside on a tight three-dimensional plane between mass, gas-phase metallicity and star formation rate (SFR), which can be explained by the interplay between metal-poor gas inflows, SFR and outflows. However, different metals are released on different time-scales, which may affect the slope of this relation. Here, we use central, star-forming galaxies with M$_{\rm star}=10^{9.0-10.5}$ M$_{\odot}$ from the EAGLE hydrodynamical simulation to examine three-dimensional relations between mass, SFR and chemical enrichment using absolute and relative C, N, O and Fe abundances. We show that the scatter is smaller when gas-phase $\alpha$-enhancement is used rather than metallicity. A similar plane also exists for stellar $\alpha$-enhancement, implying that present-day specific SFRs are correlated with long time-scale star formation histories. Between $z=0$ and 1, the $\alpha$-enhancement plane is even more insensitive to redshift than the plane using metallicity. However, it evolves at $z>1$ due to lagging iron yields. At fixed mass, galaxies with higher SFRs have star formation histories shifted toward late times, are more $\alpha$-enhanced and this $\alpha$-enhancement increases with redshift as observed. These findings suggest that relations between physical properties inferred from observations may be affected by systematic variations in $\alpha$-enhancements.