An Oxygen Abundance Gradient into the Outer Disk of M81
  The extended HI disk and tidal tails of M81 present an interesting
environment to study the effects of galaxy interaction on star formation and
chemical evolution of the outer disk of a large spiral galaxy. We present
H{\alpha} imaging of the outer disk of M81 and luminosities for 40 HII regions
out to about 3 times the optical radius. We have also obtained MMT spectra for
21 HII regions out to more than twice the optical radius. We derive strong line
oxygen abundances for all HII regions using R_{23} based and [NII]/[OII] based
calibrations and electron temperature abundances for seven regions spanning a
galactocentric distance between 5.7 and 32 kpc. We also comment on the
abundances of HII regions near KDG 61 and the "tidal dwarf" candidate HoIX. Our
results constitute the most radially extended metallicity study for M81 to
date. With this extended data set, we find an overall oxygen abundance gradient
of -0.013 dex/kpc over the entire radial range. This is significantly flatter
than what has been found in previous studies which were limited to the optical
disk. From our temperature based abundances, we find a gradient of -0.020
dex/kpc and present the possibility of a broken gradient from these data, but
note the need to obtain more temperature based abundances at intermediate
galactocentric distances (~10-20 kpc) to verify whether or not this may be the
case. We discuss our main result of a rather flat gradient for M81 in the
context of simulations and observations of abundance gradients in other
galaxies. We find that the shallow abundance gradient of M81 is likely a result
of the interaction history of this galaxy.
