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Description
The search for chemically unevolved galaxies remains prevalent in the nearby Universe, mostly because these systems provide excellent proxies for exploring in detail the physics of high-z systems. The most promising candidates are extremely metal-poor galaxies (XMPs), i.e. galaxies with <1/10 solar metallicity. However, due to the bright emission-line-based search criteria traditionally used to find XMPs, we may not be sampling the full XMP population. In 2014, we reoriented this search using only morphological properties and uncovered a population of ~150 'blue diffuse dwarf (BDD) galaxies', and published a sub-sample of 12 BDD spectra. Here, we present optical spectroscopic observations of a larger sample of 51 BDDs, along with their Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) photometric properties. With our improved statistics, we use direct-method abundances to confirm that BDDs are chemically unevolved (7.43<12+log(O/H)<8.01), with ~20 per cent of our sample classified as being XMP galaxies, and find that they are actively forming stars at rates of ~1-33x10^-2^M_{sun}_/yr in HII regions randomly embedded in a blue, low-surface-brightness continuum. Stellar masses are calculated from population synthesis models and estimated to be in the range log (M_*_/M_{sun}_)~=5-9. Unlike other low-metallicity star-forming galaxies, BDDs are in agreement with the mass-metallicity relation at low masses, suggesting that they are not accreting large amounts of pristine gas relative to their stellar mass. BDD galaxies appear to be a population of actively star-forming dwarf irregular (dIrr) galaxies which fall within the class of low-surface-brightness dIrr galaxies. Their ongoing star formation and irregular morphology make them excellent analogues for galaxies in the early Universe.
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