THE MASS-METALLICITY RELATION WITH THE DIRECT METHOD ON STACKED SPECTRA OF SDSS GALAXIES

The relation between galaxy stellar mass and gas-phase metallicity is a sensitive diagnostic of the main processes that drive galaxy evolution, namely cosmological gas inflow, metal production in stars, and gas outflow via galactic winds. We employed the direct method to measure the metallicities of ~200,000 star-forming galaxies from the SDSS that were stacked in bins of (1) stellar mass and (2) both stellar mass and star formation rate (SFR) to significantly enhance the signal-to-noise ratio of the weak [O III] 4363 and [O II] 7320, 7330 auroral lines required to apply the direct method. These metallicity measurements span three decades in stellar mass from log(Mstar/Msun) = 7.4-10.5, which allows the direct…