The Evolution of the Stellar Mass-Chemical Abundance Relation over Seven Billion Years

To understand how galaxies evolve, measurements that characterize the diffuse gas within galaxies are needed. One such measurement is the chemical content produced by stars. It is a fossilized record of cumulative star formation that is impacted by gas inflows and outflows. Driven by these insights, my NASA Space Grant project focused on constructing a stellar mass--chemical abundance relation for high-redshift galaxies. Contrary to previous work, my analyses derive chemical abundances using more robust measurements sensitive to the gas temperature. This makes it one of the first extragalactic studies to do so for the early universe. Specifically, we use the [OIII]4363 emission line and implement a spectral stacking approach to increase the detection signal for this weak emission line. With stacks for different stellar mass bins, our preliminary results illustrate that a correlation exists between stellar mass and chemical abundance for high-redshift galaxies.