The impact of the nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio on ionized nebula diagnostics based on [N ii] emission lines

We study the relation between nitrogen and oxygen abundances as a function of metallicity for a sample of emission-line objects for which a direct measurement of the metallicity has been possible. This sample is representative of the very different conditions in ionization and chemical enrichment that we can find in the Universe. We first construct the N/O versus O/H ratio diagram, and discuss its large dispersion at all metallicity regimes. Using the same sample and a large grid of photoionization models covering very different values of the N/O ratio, we then study the most widely used strong-line calibrators of metallicity based on [N ii] emission lines, such as N2 and O3N2. We demonstrate that these parameters underestimate the metallicity at low N/O ratios and vice versa. We also investigate the effect of the N/O ratio on different diagnostic diagrams used to discriminate narrow-line active galactic nuclei from star-forming regions, such as the [O iii]/H beta versus [N ii]/H alpha, and show that a large fraction of the galaxies catalogued as composite in this diagram can be, in fact, star-forming galaxies with a high value of the N/O ratio. Finally, using strong-line methods sensitive to the N/O abundance ratio, like N2O2 and N2S2, we investigate the relation between this ratio and the stellar mass for the galaxies of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We find, as in the case of the mass-metallicity relation, a correlation between these two quantities and a flattening of the relation for the most massive galaxies, which could be a consequence of the enhancement of the dispersion of N/O ratio in the high-metallicity regime.