Oxygen and nitrogen abundances in Virgo and field spirals

Abstract

The oxygen and nitrogen abundances in the H II regions of the nine Virgo spirals of the sample from Skillman et al. (1996) and in nine field spiral galaxies are re-determined with the recently suggested P-method. We confirm that there is an abundance segregation in the sample of Virgo spirals in the sense that the H I deficient Virgo spirals near the core of the cluster have higher oxygen abundances in comparison to the spirals at the periphery of the Virgo cluster. At the same time both the Virgo periphery and core spirals have counterparts among field spirals. Some field spirals have H I to optical radius ratios, similar to that in H I deficient Virgo core spirals. We conclude that if there is a difference in the abundance properties of the Virgo and field spirals, this difference appears to be small and masked by the observational errors.