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Published August 1, 2013 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Testing the Universality of the Fundamental Metallicity Relation at High Redshift Using Low-mass Gravitationally Lensed Galaxies

Abstract

We present rest-frame optical spectra for a sample of nine low-mass star-forming galaxies in the redshift range 1.5 < z < 3 which are gravitationally lensed by foreground clusters. We used Triplespec, an echelle spectrograph at the Palomar 200 inch telescope that is very effective for this purpose as it samples the entire near-infrared spectrum simultaneously. By measuring the flux of nebular emission lines, we derive gas-phase metallicities and star formation rates, and by fitting the optical to infrared spectral energy distributions we obtain stellar masses. Taking advantage of the high magnification due to strong lensing, we are able to probe the physical properties of galaxies with stellar masses in the range 7.8 < log M/M☉ < 9.4 whose star formation rates are similar to those of typical star-forming galaxies in the local universe. We compare our results with the locally determined relation between stellar mass, gas metallicity, and star formation rate. Our data are in excellent agreement with this relation, with an average offset <Δlog (O/H)> = 0.01 ± 0.08, suggesting a universal relationship. Remarkably, the scatter around the fundamental metallicity relation is only 0.24 dex, smaller than that observed locally at the same stellar masses, which may provide an important additional constraint for galaxy evolution models.

Additional Information

© 2013 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2013 February 14; accepted 2013 May 21; published 2013 July 17. We acknowledge Kevin Bundy for providing the WIRC reduction pipeline, Eiichi Egami for the IRAC mosaic images, and Marceau Limousin and Drew Newman for some of the magnification factors. We thank Drew Newman and Gwen Rudie for useful discussions. We also thank the anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. R.S.E. and S.B. are supported for this work via NSF grant 0909159. J.R. is supported by the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant 294074.

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Published - 0004-637X_772_2_141.pdf

Submitted - 1302.3614v2.pdf

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