Detection of metallicity correlations in 100 nearby galaxies Li, Zefeng Galbany González, Lluis Galaxy: abundances Galaxies: ISM MRK acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council through awards FT180100375 and DP190101258. EW and JTM acknowledge support by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013. SFS is grateful for the support of a CONACYT grant CB-285080 and FC-2016-01-1916, and funding from the PAPIIT-DGAPAIN100519 (UNAM) project.LGwas funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 839090. LG has also been partially supported by the Spanish grant PGC2018-095317-B-C21 within the European Funds for Regional Development (FEDER) In this paper, we analyse the statistics of the 2D gas-phase oxygen abundance distributions of 100 nearby galaxies drawn from the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field spectroscopy Area survey. After removing the large-scale radial metallicity gradient, we compute the two-point correlation functions of the resulting metallicity fluctuation maps. We detect correlations in the majority of our targets, which we show are significantly in excess of what is expected due to beam-smearing, and are robust against the choice of metallicity diagnostic. We show that the correlation functions are generally well-fit by the predictions of a simple model for stochastic metal injection coupled with diffusion, and from the model we show that, after accounting for the effects of both beam smearing and noise, the galaxies in our sample have characteristic correlation lengths of ∼1 kpc. Correlation lengths increase with both stellar mass and star formation rate, but show no significant variation with Hubble type, barredness, or merging state. We also find no evidence for a theoretically predicted relationship between gas velocity dispersion and correlation length, though this may be due to the small dynamic range in gas velocity dispersion across our sample. Our results suggest that measurements of 2D metallicity correlation functions can be a powerful tool for studying galaxy evolution. 2021-11-17T11:00:24Z 2021-11-17T11:00:24Z 2021-07-01 journal article Li, Z., Krumholz, M. R., Wisnioski, E., Mendel, J. T., Kewley, L. J., Sánchez, S. F., & Galbany, L. Detection of metallicity correlations in 100 nearby galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. [ https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stab1263] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/71576 10.1093/mnras/stab1263 eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/839090 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ open access Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España Oxford University Press