The Galaxy Population of Abell 1367: The Stellar Mass-Metallicity
  Relation
  Using wide baseline broad-band photometry, we analyse the stellar population
properties of a sample of 72 galaxies, spanning a wide range of stellar masses
and morphological types, in the nearby spiral-rich and dynamically young galaxy
cluster Abell 1367. The sample galaxies are distributed from the cluster centre
out to approximately half the cluster Abell radius. The optical/near-infrared
colours are compared with simple stellar population synthesis models from which
the luminosity-weighted stellar population ages and metallicities are
determined. The locus of the colours of elliptical galaxies traces a sequence
of varying metallicity at a narrow range of luminosity-weighted stellar ages.
Lenticular galaxies in the red sequence, however, exhibit a substantial spread
of luminosity-weighted stellar metallicities and ages. For red sequence
lenticular galaxies and blue cloud galaxies, low mass galaxies tend to be on
average dominated by stellar populations of younger luminosity-weighted ages.
Sample galaxies exhibit a strong correlation between integrated stellar mass
and luminosity-weighted stellar metallicity. Galaxies with signs of
morphological disturbance and ongoing star formation activity, tend to be
underabundant with respect to passive galaxies in the red sequence of
comparable stellar masses. We argue that this could be due to tidally-driven
gas flows toward the star-forming regions, carrying less enriched gas and
diluting the pre-existing gas to produce younger stellar populations with lower
metallicities than would be obtained prior to the interaction. Finally, we find
no statistically significant evidence for changes in the luminosity-weighted
ages and metallicities for either red sequence or blue cloud galaxies, at fixed
stellar mass, with location within the cluster.
