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The MOSDEF Survey: Sulfur Emission-line Ratios Provide New Insights into Evolving Interstellar Medium Conditions at High Redshift

  • Authors: Alice E. Shapley, Ryan L. Sanders, Peng Shao, Naveen A. Reddy, Mariska Kriek, Alison L. Coil, Bahram Mobasher, Brian Siana, Irene Shivaei, William R. Freeman, Mojegan Azadi, Sedona H. Price, Gene C. K. Leung, Tara Fetherolf, Laura de Groot, Tom Zick, Francesca M. Fornasini, and Guillermo Barro

2019 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 881 L35.

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 2.

Median ΣSFR for SDSS galaxies as a function of position in the [S II] BPT diagram. There is a strong trend for galaxies with higher values of ΣSFR to be shifted toward lower values of [S II]λλ6717, 3731/Hα at fixed [O III]λ 5007/Hβ (Masters et al. 2016). In addition, we indicate the running median for local H II regions (Pilyugin & Grebel 2016) with the dotted pink line. The running median line ratios are calculated in bins of H II-region electron temperature. The hiionly model from Sanders et al. (2017) is shown with the dashed black line, representing the ensemble average emission from H II regions in star-forming galaxies in the absence of DIG emission. Finally, the running median for “DIG”-like (i.e., low Hα surface brightness) spaxels from the SDSS/MaNGA DIG galaxy sample used in Sanders et al. (2017) is shown as the solid dark-gray curve. The running median line ratios for the “DIG”-like curve are calculated in bins of ([O III]λ 5007/Hβ)/([N II]λ6584/Hα), which correlates with nebular metallicity in local H II regions (Pettini & Pagel 2004).

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