Self-enrichment of merging stellar clusters

We examine the mass-metallicity trend of nearby z ∼ 0.1 galaxies presented by Tremonti et al. (2004) and compare it to detailed chemical evolution models. Our study was done in order to identify the environmental factors that govern observed metallicities. We found that the Tremonti data might not have been coeval, which would lead to a degeneracy between metallicity and age. While metallicity was measured using oxygen lines, we found that other metals offer different evolutions and therefore, various predictions for a mass-metallicity relationship. We also present initial studies investigating how short stellar lifetimes and metals ejected by massive stars influenced the observed chemical abundance variations in 10 ⁴ - 10 ⁶M _⊙ galaxies. We will incorporate all of these factors into a hydrodynamic model to simulate the recent merger history of nearby galaxies.