Investigating The Scaling Relations In Nearby Galaxies

The formation and evolution of galaxies is an important area of galaxy astronomy research.During the formation and evolution of galaxies,physical quantities such as morphological structure,stellar mass,metallicity,and gas content of galaxies change with the relevant physical processes.The multi-band observations of galaxies in the local Universe provide large data for us to study the scaling relation between these physical quantities.In this paper,we investigate the scaling relationships between some physical quantities in the local Universe that are related to galaxy formation and evolution activity,and with these relations,we can further investigate the formation and evolution of galaxies.In chapter 2 we investigate the galaxy size-stellar mass relation for 1,479 poststarburst galaxies selected from SDSS DR8 at redshift z(?)0.33.By constructing a control sample of star-forming and quiescent galaxies,we find that the galaxy sizes of post-starburst galaxies with stellar masses 109 M⊙<M*<1012 M⊙ are smaller than or close to the sizes of quiet galaxies,and much smaller than the sizes of star-forming galaxies.The difference in size between post-starburst galaxies and quiescent galaxies becomes larger near the low-mass end.We suggest that the formation mechanism of these local post-starburst galaxies is similar to that at high redshift,and mainly undergoes a rapid evolutionary pathway,i.e.,rapid quenching of star formation following a short-lived starburst event.We also find that post-starburst galaxies at M*(?)1010 M⊙are more clustered than more massive ones.The post-starburst galaxies resided in groups are found to be slightly larger in galaxy size and more disk-like compared to field post-starburst galaxies.These results support multiple evolutionary pathways for local post-starburst galaxies.In chapter 3 we study the relation between the properties of the bulge/disc components and the HI mass fraction(fHI=MHI/M*)of galaxies by using neutral gas data from the ALFALFA survey as well as galaxy bulge-disk decomposition catalog.We find that at fixed stellar mass,disc colors are correlated with the H I mass fraction,while bulge colors are not.The lack of a correlation between the bulge color and the H I mass fraction is regardless of whether the bulges are pseudo,or whether the galaxies host bars or are interacting with a neighbor.There is no strong correlation between the colors of the discs and bulges either.These results suggest that the current total amount of H I is closely related to the formation of discs,but does not necessarily fuel the formation of(pseudo)bulges in an efficient way.We do not find evidence for the star formation in the discs to be quenched by the bulges.In chapter 4 we use 789(596 HI detections)disk-like,star-forming galaxies from HI follow-up observations for the SDSS-IV MaNGA survey to study the secondary dependence in the mass-gas phase metallicity relation.We confirm the anti-correlation between total HI mass and gas-phase metallicity at a fixed stellar mass,but this anticorrelation is weaker for SFR.We derive the inner HI mass within the optical radius and find that the anti-correlation is significantly strengthened when the total H I mass is replaced by the inner HI mass.The anti-correlation is strengthened in the galaxy optical outer region compared with the central region.These results support the idea that the scatter in the mass-metallicity relation is primarily driven by gas accretion,and stress the importance of using inner HI mass instead of total H I mass in the study of galaxy evolution.Through the above series of work,this thesis investigates some scaling relations of different types of galaxies using different wavelengths of data and analyzes the physical causes of these scaling relations and the causes of dispersion.In the future,we will further investigate the role of gas in galaxy formation and evolution by combining observations from projects such as WALLABY and FAST,and provide a more comprehensive observational basis and test for the theoretical framework of galaxy formation and evolution.