Chemical abundances and deviations from the solar S/O ratio in the gas-phase ISM of galaxies based on infrared emission lines

Abstract: The infrared (IR) range is extremely useful in the context of chemical abundance studies of the gas-phase interstellar medium (ISM) due to the large variety of ionic species traced in this regime, the negligible effects from dust attenuation or temperature stratification, and the amount of data that has been and will be released in the coming years. Taking advantage of available IR emission lines, we analysed the chemical content of the gas-phase ISM in a sample of 131 Star-Forming Galaxies (SFGs) and 73 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). Particularly, we derived the chemical content via their total oxygen abundance in combination with nitrogen and sulfur abundances, and with the ionisation parameter. We used a new version of the code HII-CHI-Mistry-IR v3.1 which allows us to estimate log(N/O), 12+log(O/H), log(U), and, for the first time, 12+log(S/H) from IR emission lines, which can be applied to both SFGs and AGNs. We tested that the estimations from this new version, that only considers sulfur lines for the derivation of sulfur abundances, are compatible with previous studies. While most of the SFGs and AGNs show solar log(N/O) abundances, we found a large spread in the log(S/O) relative abundances. Specifically, we found extremely low log(S/O) values (1/10th solar) in some SFGs and AGNs with solar-like oxygen abundances. This result warns against the use of optical and IR sulfur emission lines to estimate oxygen abundances when no prior estimation of log(S/O) is provided.