Abundances of emission galaxies in SDSS-DR3

We find that extremely metal-poor galaxies (12+logO/H<7.6, i.e. Z<Z_{sun}_/12) are rare in the SDSS sample. The alpha element to oxygen abundance ratios do not show any significant trends with oxygen abundance, in agreement with previous studies, except for a slight increase of Ne/O with increasing metallicity, which we interpret as due to a moderate depletion of O onto grains in the most metal-rich galaxies. The Fe/O abundance ratio is smaller than the solar value, by up to 1 dex at the high metallicity end.

We also find that Fe/O increases with decreasing Hbeta equivalent width EW(Hbeta). We interpret this as a sign of strong depletion onto dust grains, and gradual destruction of those grains on a time scale of a few Myr. All the galaxies are found to have logN/O>-1.6, implying that they have a different nature than the subsample of high-redshift damped Lyalpha systems with log N/O of ~-2.3 and that their ages are larger than 100-300Myr.

We confirm the apparent increase in N/O with decreasing EW(Hbeta), already shown in previous studies, and explain it as the signature of gradual nitrogen ejection by massive stars from the most recent starburst.