{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/gas-phase-metallicity-break-radii-of-star","title":"Gas-phase metallicity break radii of star-forming galaxies in IllustrisTNG","arxiv_id":"2212.03326","date":"2022-12-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Alex M. Garcia","Paul Torrey","Z. S. Hemler","Lars Hernquist","Lisa J. Kewley","Erica J. Nelson","Kathryn Grasha","Henry R. M. Zovaro","Qian-Hui Chen"],"abstract":"We present radial gas-phase metallicity profiles, gradients, and break radii at redshift $z = 0 - 3$ from the TNG50-1 star-forming galaxy population. These metallicity profiles are characterized by an emphasis on identifying the steep inner gradient and flat outer gradient. From this, the break radius, $r_{\\rm Break}$, is defined as the region where the transition occurs. We observe the break radius having a positive trend with mass that weakens with redshift. When normalized by the stellar half-mass radius, the break radius has a weaker relation with both mass and redshift. To test if our results are dependent on the resolution or adopted physics of TNG50-1, the same analysis is performed in TNG50-2 and Illustris-1. We find general agreement between each of the simulations in their qualitative trends; however, the adopted physics between TNG and Illustris differ and therefore the breaks, normalized by galaxy size, deviate by a factor of $\\sim$2. In order to understand where the break comes from, we define two relevant time-scales: an enrichment time-scale and a radial gas mixing time-scale. We find that $r_{\\rm Break}$ occurs where the gas mixing time-scale is $\\sim$10 times as long as the enrichment time-scale in all three simulation runs, with some weak mass and redshift dependence. This implies that galactic disks can be thought of in two-parts: a star-forming inner disk with a steep gradient and a mixing-dominated outer disk with a flat gradient, with the break radius marking the region of transition between them.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03326v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.03326v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"gas-phase-metallicity-break-radii-of-star","repo_url":"https://github.com/AlexGarcia623/Break-Radii","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}