Does environment effect the gas-phase metallicity of star-forming galaxies?

The debate between nature versus nurture is still not over regarding the chemical evolution of cluster galaxies. Recent observations presents the cluster-scale gradient in the metallicity of star-forming galaxies as a complementary method to discern the impact of environment on chemical evolution. Our observations for MACS J1115+0129 show that cluster galaxies near the cluster center are more metal rich compared to galaxies in the cluster outskirt. Ram pressure stripping in the cluster environment leads to truncated galactic disks, which can introduce an observational bias in the integrated metallicity measurement. In this talk, I will present our simulation of disk truncation in cluster galaxies using a semi-analytic model of ram pressure stripping and integral field spectroscopic data from the CALIFA survey. Our simulation shows that the ram pressure stripping can produce a negative gradient in the integrated metallicity with the cluster radius. Under the influence of ram pressure only massive galaxies continues to form star in the cluster core resulting in a higher average stellar mass in the cluster center than the cluster outskirt for star-forming galaxies. The stellar mass bias induced by the ram pressure strippings is responsible for the negative gradient in the integrated metallicity predicted in our disk truncation simulation. Our simulation proves that the ram pressure stripping alone might not be enough to reproduce the observed variation of the metallicity of star-forming cluster galaxies with cluster radius.Paper reference - Gupta et al., 2017, ApJ, 842 (astro-ph: 1705.08452) and Gupta et al., 2016, ApJ, 831(astro-ph: 1608.06289v2