EA: Chemical evolution of galaxies- Tissera

The evolution of chemical abundances in galaxies provides crucial information to study how they formed and evolved.

Results in the Local Universe show that on average, star-forming gas-phase in galaxies  have negative metallicity gradients and that flat and inverted positive gradients could be associated with galaxy interactions. As a function of redshift, the trend is not clear enough yet, although there is a significant fraction of inverted metallicity gradients.

In series of papers using the EAGLE simulations, we studied the metallicity gradients at z=0 and the processes that might affect them and the azimuthal metallicity distribution such as mergers, SN and AGN feedback and gas inflows. We extended the analysis as a function of redshift, focusing on the impact of mergers in triggering strong positive or negative gradientes. We found galaxies with negative metallicity gradients more frequent in disc-dominated galaxies, which also determine a relation with size. Galaxies with positive gradients departure from this relation and show  systematic differences to be associated with recent mergers or starbursts.

In this talk, I am going to summarize the latest results from the EAGLE project, on the evolution of the metallicity gradients as a function of stellar mass, galaxy size and star formation efficiency up to z~2.5 and  on the impact of the environment by analyzing  the metallicity gradients of galaxies in voids and filaments.