Effects of the spiral arm structure on the metallicity gradients in the galactic disk

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In the disks of spiral galaxies, star formation takes place mainly in the spiral arms, and the spiral shocks are the main mechanism triggering star formation. On the other hand, the enrichment of the interstellar medium in metals is mostly due to massive and short-lived starsThe rate of star formation directly influences the rate of increase of metallicity, so that we expect to observe high metallicity in regions of the disk that had a high star formation rate in the recent billion years. In this work we examine two very different effects of the spiral structure on the chemical structure of the Galactic disk. One is the direct effect of the spiral arms on the star-formation rate. For instance, in principle, outside the region situated between the Inner and Outer Lindblab Resonances, there should not be spiral arms; the star formation rate should drop outside this range of radius, and the metallicity should also drop. Near corotation a minimum of metallicity is also expected. The second effect of the spiral arms is that near corotation, the resonance of stellar orbital period with the spiral pattern rotation is able to accelerate the stars, and to produce changes in the radius of their orbit. As a consequence, some stars of the solar neighborhood, and probably the Sun itself, were born at a different radius. Some of them present a relatively high metallicity because they were born at an inner galactic radius. This second effect does not affect young objects nor the metallicity of the interstellar medium. We compare the prediction of our models with different metallicity tracers of the Galactic disk, and with metallicity gradients in external galaxies.

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