Context. Gas-phase abundances provide insights into the baryon cycle, with radial gradients and 2D metallicity distributions tracking how metals are built up and redistributed across galaxy disks over cosmic time.
Aims. We use a catalog of 22 958 H II regions across 19 nearby spiral galaxies to examine how precisely the radial abundance gradients can be traced when using only the [N II] λ5755 electron temperature as a proxy for temperature-based, direct method metallicities.
Methods. Using 534 direct detections of the temperature sensitive [N II] λ5755 auroral line, we measured gradients in 15 of the galaxies. Leveraging our large catalog of individual H II regions, we carried out a stacking procedure in bins of the H II region [N II] λ6583 luminosity and radius to recover stacked radial gradients.
Results. We found a good agreement between the metallicity gradients from the stacked spectra and those gradients from individual regions and those from strong-line methods. In addition, particularly in the stacked Te[N II] measurements, some galaxies show very low (< 0.05 dex) scatter in metallicities, indicative of a well-mixed ISM. We examined the individual high confidence (S/N > 5) outliers and identified 13 regions across nine galaxies with anomalously low metallicities, although this is not strongly reflected in the strong-line method metallicities. By stacking arm and interarm regions, we found no systematic evidence for offsets in metallicity between these environments, suggesting that enrichment within spiral arms is due to very localized processes.
Conclusions. This work demonstrates the potential to systematically exploit the single [N II] λ5755 auroral line for detailed gas-phase abundance studies of galaxies. It provides strong validation of previous results, based on the strong-line calibrations, of a well-mixed ISM across typical star-forming spiral galaxies.
