We measure the oxygen metallicity of the ionized gas along the major axis of seven dwarf star-forming galaxies. Two of them, SDSSJ1647+21 and SDSSJ2238+14, show 0.5 dex metallicity decrements in inner regions with enhanced star-formation activity. Th
is behavior is similar to the metallicity drop observed in a number of local tadpole galaxies by Sanchez Almeida et al. (2013) and interpreted as showing early stages of assembling in disk galaxies, with the star formation sustained by external metal-poor gas accretion. The agreement with tadpoles has several implications: (1) it proves that galaxies other than the local tadpoles present the same unusual metallicity pattern. (2) Our metallicity inhomogeneities were inferred using the direct method, thus discarding systematic errors usually attributed to other methods. (3) Taken together with the tadpole data, our findings suggest a threshold around one tenth the solar value for the metallicity drops to show up. Although galaxies with clear metallicity drops are rare, the physical mechanism responsible for them may sustain a significant part of the star-formation activity in the local Universe. We argue that the star-formation dependence of the mass-metallicity relationship, as well as other general properties followed by most local disk galaxies, are naturally interpreted as side effects of pristine gas infall. Alternatives to the metal poor gas accretion are examined too.
We carry out a systematic search for extremely metal poor (XMP) galaxies in the spectroscopic sample of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data release 7 (DR7). The XMP candidates are found by classifying all the galaxies according to the form of their
spectra in a region 80AA wide around Halpha. Due to the data size, the method requires an automatic classification algorithm. We use k-means. Our systematic search renders 32 galaxies having negligible [NII] lines, as expected in XMP galaxy spectra. Twenty one of them have been previously identified as XMP galaxies in the literature -- the remaining eleven are new. This was established after a thorough bibliographic search that yielded only some 130 galaxies known to have an oxygen metallicity ten times smaller than the Sun (explicitly, with 12+log(O/H) <= 7.65). XMP galaxies are rare; they represent 0.01% of the galaxies with emission lines in SDSS/DR7. Although the final metallicity estimate of all candidates remains pending, strong-line empirical calibrations indicate a metallicity about one-tenth solar, with the oxygen metallicity of the twenty one known targets being 12+log(O/H)= 7.61 +- 0.19. Since the SDSS catalog is limited in apparent magnitude, we have been able to estimate the volume number density of XMP galaxies in the local universe, which turns out to be (1.32 +- 0.23) x 10^-4 Mpc^-3. The XMP galaxies constitute 0.1% of the galaxies in the local volume, or some 0.2% considering only emission line galaxies. All but four of our candidates are blue compact dwarf galaxies (BCDs), and 24 of them have either cometary shape or are formed by chained knots.
