Reconciling the Stellar and Nebular Spectra of High Redshift Galaxies

I will be talking about the recent paper titled "Reconciling the Stellar and Nebular Spectra of High Redshift Galaxies," by C. Steidel et al. 2016, in which deep rest-frame optical and UV composite spectra, built from a sample of 30 star-forming galaxies at z = 2.4, along with stellar population synthesis and photoionization modeling, are used to determine the stellar and nebular metallicities of the composite sample. The authors find that models including binary stars, low stellar metallicity (~0.1 solar), and relatively high nebular metallicity (~0.5 solar), are required to reproduce the observed spectra. A highly super-solar O/Fe ratio suggests that the discrepancy in metallicity between the stars and gas can be explained by an ISM which is enriched primarily by the products of core-collapse supernovae.