The Origin of the Stellar Mass-Stellar Metallicity Relation in the Milky Way Satellites and beyond

Abstract

Observations and semianalytical galaxy formation and evolution models (SAMs) have suggested the existence of a stellar mass-stellar metallicity relation (MZR), which is shown to be universal for different types of galaxies over a large range of stellar masses ($M_*\sim 10^3$-$10^{11}M_\odot$) and dark matter (DM) halo masses ($M_{\rm halo}\sim 10^9$-$10^{15}h^{-1}M_\odot$). In this work, we construct a chemical evolution model to investigate the origin of the MZR, including both the effects of gas inflows and outflows in galaxies. We solve the MZR from the chemical evolution model, by assuming that the cold gas mass ($M_{\rm cold}$) and the stellar feedback efficiency ($\beta$) follow some power-law scaling relationships with $M_*$ during the growth of a galaxy, i.e., $M_{\rm cold}\propto M_*^{\alpha_{\rm gs}}$ and $\beta\propto M_*^{\alpha_{\beta{\rm s}}}$. We use the SAM to obtain these power-law scaling relations, which appear to be roughly universal over a large range of stellar masses for both satellites and central galaxies within a large range of halo masses. The range of the MZRs produced by our models is in a narrow space, which provides support to the universality of the MZRs. The formation of the MZR is a result caused jointly by that the cold gas fraction decreases with increasing $M_*$ and by that the stellar feedback efficiency decreases with increasing $M_*$ in the galaxy growth, and the exponent in the MZR is around $-\alpha_{\beta{\rm s}}$ or $1-\alpha_{\rm gs}$. The MZR represents an ''average'' evolutional track for the stellar metallicity of a galaxy. The comparison of our model with some previous models for the origin of MZRs is also discussed.