2025/04/26 by Jia Cheng, Enci Wang, Jia, Cheng +21 · 1 citation
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.2504.18820
openalex publication_date 2025/04/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The gravitational potential is established as a critical determinant of gas-phase metallicity (12+log(O/H)) in low-redshift galaxies, whereas its influence remains unconfirmed at high redshifts. We investigate the correlation between gas-phase metallicity and effective radius (R\rm e) for a sample of galaxies with redshifts ranging from 1 to 7, drawn from JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) Data Release 3. We calculate the metallicities using four strong-line methods: \rm N2S2Hα, \rm R23, \rm N2, and \rm O3N2, respectively. After taking out the evolution of size, we find that the offsets of mass-size relation (Δlog R\rm e) are significantly negatively correlated with the offset of mass-metallicity relation (Δlog(\rm O/H)) for the four metallicity tracers. Regardless of the metallicity tracer used, we obtain Spearman rank p-values much less than 0.01, rejecting the null hypothesis that the observed correlation is statistically nonsignificant and attributable to random chance. This is also true for galaxies with z>3, with p-values less than 0.05 for the four metallicity tracers. We for the first time find evidence of size playing a key role in determining gas-phase metallicity towards cosmic dawn, suggesting that the gravitational potential influences their material-exchange processes with the surrounding environment at very early universe.