2007/12/03 by Lars Mattsson, Mattsson, Lars, Brady Caldwell +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0712.0345
2 pages, 1 figure. To appear in the proceedings of "Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Disks" (J. G. Funes, and E. M. Corsini eds)
arxiv created 2007/12/03 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
We have derived oxygen and nitrogen abundances of a sample of late-type, low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies found in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Furthermore, we have computed a large grid (5000 models) of chemical evolution models (CEMs) testing various time-scales for infall, baryon densities and several power-law initial mass functions (IMFs) as well. Because of the rather stable N/O-trends found both in CEMs (for a given IMF) and in observations, we find that the hypotheses that LSB galaxies have stellar populations dominated by low-mass stars, i.e., very bottom-heavy IMFs (see Lee et al. 2004), can be ruled out. Such models predict much too high N/O-ratios and generally too low O/H-ratios. We also conclude that LSB galaxies probably have the same ages as their high surface brightness counterparts, although the global rate of star formation must be considerably lower in these galaxies.