THE TIME EVOLUTION OF THE MILKY WAY'S OXYGEN ABUNDANCE GRADIENT
M. Mollá, A. I. Díaz, O. Cavichia, B. K. Gibson, W. J. Maciel, R. D. D. Costa,
Y. Ascasibar, C. G. Few
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 482, 3071--3088 (2019)
We study the evolution of oxygen abundance radial gradients as a function of time for
the MilkyWay Galaxy obtained with our Mulchem chemical evolution model.We review the
recent data of abundances for different objects observed in our Galactic disc.We analyse with
our models the role of the growth of the stellar disc, as well as the effect of infall rate and star
formation prescriptions, or the pre-enrichment of the infall gas, on the time evolution of the
oxygen abundance radial distribution. We compute the radial gradient of abundances within
the disk, and its corresponding evolution, taking into account the disk growth along time. We
compare our predictions with the data compilation, showing a good agreement. Our models
predict a very smooth evolution when the radial gradient is measured within the optical disc
with a slight flattening of the gradient from ~ -0.057 dex kpc-1 at z = 4 until values around
~ -0.015 dex kpc-1 at z = 1 and basically the same gradient until the present, with small
differences between models. Moreover, some models show a steepening at the last times,
from z = 1 until z = 0 in agreement with data which give a variation of the gradient in a
range from -0.02 to -0.04 dex kpc-1 from t = 10Gyr until now. The gradient measured as a
function of the normalized radius R/Reff is in good agreement with findings by CALIFA and
MUSE, and its evolution with redshift falls within the error bars of cosmological simulations
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