2024/02/21 by Yan Guo, Chandreyee Sengupta, Guo, Yan +7
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.13612
openalex publication_date 2024/02/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
A less explored aspect of dwarf galaxies is their metallicity evolution. Generally, dwarfs have lower metallicities than Hubble sequence late type galaxies but in reality, dwarfs span a wide range of metallicities with several open questions regarding the formation and evolution of the lowest and the highest metallicity dwarfs. We present a catalogue of 3459 blue, nearby, star forming dwarf galaxies extracted from SDSS DR16 including calculation of their metallicities using the mean of several calibrators. To compile our catalogue we applied redshift, absolute magnitude, stellar mass, optical diameter, and line flux signal to noise criteria. This produced a catalogue from the upper end of the dwarf galaxy stellar mass range. Our catalogued dwarfs have blue g - i colours and Hbeta equivalent widths, indicative of having undergone a recent episode of star formation, although their star formation rates (SFR) suggest only a moderate to low enhancement in star formation, similar to the SFRs in low surface brightness and evolved tidal dwarfs. While the catalogued dwarfs cover a range of metallicities, their mean metallicity is about 0.2 dex below solar metallicity, indicating relatively chemically evolved galaxies. The vast majority of the catalogue, with clean photometry, are relatively isolated dwarfs with only modest star formation rates and a narrow range of g - i colour, consistent with internally driven episodic mild bursts of star formation. The presented catalogue's robust metallicity estimates for nearby SDSS dwarf galaxies will help target future studies to understand the physical processes driving the metallicity evolution of dwarfs.