Journal article
A geostatistical analysis of multiscale metallicity variations in galaxies -III. Spatial resolution and data quality limits
B Metha, M Trenti, A Battisti, T Chu
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2024
Abstract
Geostatistical methods are powerful tools for understanding the spatial structure of the metallicity distribution of galaxies, and enable construction of accurate predictive models of the 2D metallicity distribution. However, so far these methods have only been applied to very high spatial resolution metallicity maps, leaving it uncertain if they will work on lower quality data. In this study, we apply geostatistical techniques to high-resolution spectroscopic maps of three local galaxies convolved to eight different spatial resolutions ranging from ∼40 pc to ∼1 kpc per pixel. We fit a geostatistical model to the data at all resolutions, and find that for metallicity maps where small-scale s..
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Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the anonymous referee, whose comments helped to improve the quality of this paper. BM acknowledges support from an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. This research is supported in part by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013. BM would like to thank Prof. Tommaso Treu for his mentorship and advice on using MCMC methods and for hosting a wonderful extended research visit at UCLA. The authors extend their thanks to Alejandra Lugo-Aranda for the advice on using pyHIIextractor, and to Dr Kathryn Grasha for the advice on using HIIphot and other helpful conversations. This research was conducted on Wurundjeri land.