The BPT Diagram in Cosmological Galaxy Formation Simulations: Understanding the Physics Driving Offsets at High Redshift
Abstract
The Baldwin, Philips, & Terlevich diagram of [O III]/Hβ versus [N II]/Hα (hereafter N2-BPT) has long been used as a tool for classifying galaxies based on the dominant source of ionizing radiation. Recent observations have demonstrated that galaxies at z ~ 2 reside offset from local galaxies in the N2-BPT space. In this paper, we conduct a series of controlled numerical experiments to understand the potential physical processes driving this offset. We model nebular line emission in a large sample of galaxies, taken from the SIMBA cosmological hydrodynamic galaxy formation simulation, using the CLOUDY photoionization code to compute the nebular line luminosities from H II regions. We find that the observed shift toward higher [O III]/Hβ and [N II]/Hα values at high redshift arises from sample selection: when we consider only the most massive galaxies M * ~ 1010-11 M ⊙, the offset naturally appears, due to their high metallicities. We predict that deeper observations that probe lower-mass galaxies will reveal galaxies that lie on a locus comparable to z ~ 0 observations. Even when accounting for samples-selection effects, we find that there is a subtle mismatch between simulations and observations. To resolve this discrepancy, we investigate the impact of varying ionization parameters, H II region densities, gas-phase abundance patterns, and increasing radiation field hardness on N2-BPT diagrams. We find that either decreasing the ionization parameter or increasing the N/O ratio of galaxies at fixed O/H can move galaxies along a self-similar arc in N2-BPT space that is occupied by high-redshift galaxies.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- February 2022
- DOI:
- 10.3847/1538-4357/ac43b8
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2201.03564
- Bibcode:
- 2022ApJ...926...80G
- Keywords:
-
- 594;
- 734;
- 694;
- 767;
- 844;
- Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies
- E-Print:
- 25 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ