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In this work, we investigated the nitrogen and oxygen abundances in a sample of galaxies with Low Ionization Nuclear Emission Regions (LINERs) in their nucleus. Optical spectroscopic data (3 600 - 10 000 {\AA}) of 40 LINERs from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies (MaNGA) survey were considered. Only objects classified as retired galaxies, i.e. whose main ionization sources are post-Asymptotic Giant Branch (pAGB) stars, were selected. The abundance estimates were obtained through detailed photoionization models built with the cloudy code to reproduce a set of observational emission line intensities ratios of the sample. Our results show that LINERs have oxygen and nitrogen abundances in the ranges of $ 8.0 \leq 12+\log(O/H) \leq 9.0$ (mean value $8.74\pm 0.27$) and $7.6 \leq 12+\log(N/H) \leq 8.5$ (mean value $8.05\pm 0.25$), respectively. About 70% of the sample have oversolar O/H and N/H abundances. Our abundance estimates are in consonance with those for Seyfert 2 nuclei and H ii regions with the highest metallicity, indicating that these distinct object classes show similar enrichment of the interstellar medium (ISM). The LINERs in our sample are located in the higher N/O region of the N/O versus O/H diagram, showing an expected negative correlation between these two parameters. These results suggest that these LINERs mainly exhibit a secondary nitrogen production and could be acting some other mechanisms that deviate them from the usual theoretical secondary nitrogen production curve and the H ii regions observations. However, we did not find any evidence in our data able to support the literature suggested mechanisms. On the other hand, our results show that LINERs do not present any correlation between the N/O abundances and the stellar masses of the hosting galaxies., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS

This paper presents a method for finding ram-pressure stripped (RPS) galaxy candidates by performing a morphological analysis of galaxy images obtained from the Legacy survey. We consider a sample of about 600 galaxies located in different environments such as groups and clusters, tidally interacting pairs and the field. The sample includes 160 RPS previously classified in the literature into classes from J1 to J5, based on the increasing level of disturbances. Our morphological analysis was done using the {\sc astromorphlib} software followed by the inspection of diagnostic diagrams involving combinations of different parameters like the asymmetry ($A$), concentration ($C$), S\'ersic index ($n$), and bulge strength parameters $F(G,\,M_{20})$. We found that some of those diagrams display a distinct region in which galaxies classified as J3, J4 and J5 decouples from isolated galaxies. We call this region as the morphological transition zone and we also found that tidally interacting galaxies in pairs are predominant within this zone. Nevertheless, after visually inspecting the objects in the morphological transition zone to discard obvious contaminants, we ended up with 33 bonafide new RPS candidates in the studied nearby groups and clusters (Hydra, Fornax, and CLoGS sample), of which one-third show clear evidence of unwinding arms. Future works may potentially further increase significantly the samples of known RPS using such method., Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures

The ionizing source of Low Ionization Nuclear Emission Regions (LINERs) is uncertain. Because of this, an empirical relation to determine the chemical abundances of these objects has not been proposed. In this work, for the first time, we derived two semi-empirical calibrations based on photoionization models to estimate the oxygen abundance of LINERS as a function of the $N2$ and $O3N2$ emission-line intensity ratios. These relations were calibrated using oxygen abundance estimations obtained by comparing the observational emission-line ratios of 43 LINER galaxies (taken from the MaNGA survey) and grids of photoionization models built with the {\sc Cloudy} code assuming post-Asymptotic Giant Branch (post-AGB) stars with different temperatures. We found that the oxygen abundance of LINERs in our sample is in the $\rm 8.48 <~ 12+log(O/H) <~ 8.84$ range, with a mean value of $\rm 12+\log(O/H)=8.65$. We recommend the use of the $N2$ index to estimate the oxygen abundances of LINERs, since the calibration with this index presented a much smaller dispersion than the $O3N2$ index. In addition, the estimated metallicities are in good agreement with those derived by extrapolating the disk oxygen abundance gradients to the centre of the galaxies showing that the assumptions of the models are suitable for LINERs. We also obtained a calibration between the logarithm of the ionization parameter and the [OIII]/[OII] emission-line ratio., Comment: 16 pages, 14 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS