| Abstract: |
Galaxy interactions and mergers are a fundamental and important process pertaining to galaxy evolution, however we still do not have a concrete understanding of the process. Investigating the relationship between galaxy physical properties in interacting galaxies can give us an avenue to enrich our understanding of the interaction process, which in turn will further our understanding of galaxy evolution. One such relationship is the mass-metallicity relation (MZR; Lequeux et al. 1979), a positive correlation found between the stellar mass (M*) and metallicity (Z) of galaxies. Galaxy interactions and mergers are known to dilute the gas phase metallicity in central regions of galaxies, resulting in an offset from the MZR on a global scale. This can be attributed to low metallicity gas associated with the interaction inflowing towards the nuclear region of the galaxy. In this work, we studied the spatially resolved MZR of interacting galaxies from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA; Bundy et al. 2015) catalogue to study the effect of interactions on the MZR at a local scale. We find a bimodality in distribution for spaxels in the circumnuclear regions of galaxies. In particular, we find that the core regions of galaxies belonging to close galaxy pairs show an offset below the MZR curve found for the entire MaNGA sample, whereas the core regions for more distant galaxy pairs are closer to the relation. We will discuss these results and other findings. |
