| Issue |
A&A
Volume 674, June 2023
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | L7 | |
| Number of page(s) | 5 | |
| Section | Letters to the Editor | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202346846 | |
| Published online | 09 June 2023 | |
Letter to the Editor
Gas and stellar kinematic misalignment in MaNGA galaxies: What is the origin of counter-rotating gas?
1
Faculty of Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Scheinerstr. 1, 81679 Munich, Germany
2
Main Astronomical Observatory, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 27 Akademika Zabolotnoho St., 03143 Kyiv, Ukraine
e-mail: zinchenko@mao.kiev.ua
Received:
8
May
2023
Accepted:
20
May
2023
Context. Kinematic misalignment between gas and stellar components is observed in a certain fraction of galaxies. It believed to be caused by the acquisition of gas from the external reservoir by, for example, major or minor mergers, accretion from cosmological filaments, or the circumgalactic medium.
Aims. We aim to constrain the possible sources of the gas that forms the counter-rotating component.
Methods. We derived the gas-phase oxygen abundances of 69 galaxies with a kinematic misalignment between gas and stellar components from the MaNGA DR17 survey and compared them with the metallicity expected according to the mass–metallicity relation.
Results. We find that the oxygen abundance of the counter-rotating gas in our sample is higher than 8.2 dex, which rules out a significant role for the inflow of pristine gas. Meanwhile, there is a significant difference in the oxygen abundance of the counter-rotating gas between red and blue galaxies. In general, the oxygen abundance is lower than expected for the stellar mass in red galaxies but is compatible with or even higher than typical values for the stellar mass in blue galaxies.
Conclusions. We show that the exchange of enriched gas between galaxies is the most plausible mechanism for explaining the metallicity of counter-rotating gas components in galaxies of all masses and colors. Meanwhile, minor mergers may play a significant role in the formation of counter-rotating gas components in red and quenched galaxies.
Key words: ISM: abundances / galaxies: evolution / HII regions / galaxies: kinematics and dynamics
© The Authors 2023
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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