Potential-driven Metal Cycling: JADES Census of Gas-phase Metallicity for Galaxies at 1 < z < 7

作者：Jia Cheng, Enci Wang, Cheqiu Lyu, Chengyu Ma, Jie Song, Yangyao Chen, Kai Wang, Haoran Yu, Zeyu Chen, Jinyang Wang, Yifan Wang, Xu Kong · 发表于：The Astrophysical Journal Letters · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.3847/2041-8213/addfd9 · 被引用次数：6 · 研究领域：Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena、Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies、Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae

Abstract The gravitational potential is established as a critical determinant of gas-phase metallicity (12+log(O/H)) in low-redshift galaxies, whereas its influence remains unconfirmed at high redshifts. We investigate the correlation between gas-phase metallicity and effective radius ( R e ) for a sample of galaxies with redshifts ranging from 1 to 7, drawn from JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey Data Release 3. We calculate the metallicities using four strong-line methods: N2S2H α , R23, N2, and O3N2. After taking out the evolution of size, we find that the offsets of the mass–size relation ( Δ log R e ) are significantly negatively correlated with the offset of the mass–metallicity relation ( Δ log ( O / H ) ) for the four metallicity tracers. Regardless of the metallicity tracer used, we obtain Spearman rank p- values much less than 0.01, rejecting the null hypothesis that the observed correlation is statistically nonsignificant and attributable to random chance. This is also true for galaxies with z > 3, with p- values less than 0.05 for the four metallicity tracers. We for the first time find evidence of size playing a key role in determining gas-phase metallicity toward cosmic dawn, suggesting that the gravitational potential influences galaxies' material-exchange processes with the surrounding environment in the very early Universe.