THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY: THE GALAXY POPULATION DETECTED BY ALFALFA

By Shan Huang, M. Haynes, R. Giovanelli, J. Brinchmann. 2012

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Making use of H i 21 cm line measurements from the ALFALFA survey (α.40) and photometry from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), we investigate the global scaling relations and fundamental planes linking stars and gas for a sample of 9417 common galaxies: the α.40–SDSS–GALEX sample. In addition to their H i properties derived from the ALFALFA data set, stellar masses (M*) and star formation rates (SFRs) are derived from fitting the UV–optical spectral energy distributions. 96% of the α.40–SDSS–GALEX galaxies belong to the blue cloud, with the average gas fraction fH i ≡ MH i/M* ∼ 1.5. A transition in star formation (SF) properties is found whereby below M* ∼ 109.5 M☉, the slope of the star-forming sequence changes, the dispersion in the specific star formation rate (SSFR) distribution increases, and the star formation efficiency (SFE) mildly increases with M*. The evolutionary track in the SSFR–M* diagram, as well as that in the color–magnitude diagram, is linked to the H i content; below this transition mass, the SF is regulated strongly by the H i. Comparison of H i and optically selected samples over the same restricted volume shows that the H i-selected population is less evolved and has overall higher SFR and SSFR at a given stellar mass, but lower SFE and extinction, suggesting either that a bottleneck exists in the H i-to-H2 conversion or that the process of SF in the very H i-dominated galaxies obeys an unusual, low-efficiency SF law. A trend is found that, for a given stellar mass, high gas fraction galaxies reside preferentially in dark matter halos with high spin parameters. Because it represents a full census of H i-bearing galaxies at z ∼ 0, the scaling relations and fundamental planes derived for the ALFALFA population can be used to assess the H i detection rate by future blind H i surveys and intensity mapping experiments at higher redshift.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/244ad5546429c78b83bed651be50d514af463579

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• Illuminating Low Surface Brightness Galaxies with the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “M? relation for H I-selected galaxies from the ALFALFA survey (Huang et al. 2012; Leisman et al. 2017).”
• The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey: The ALFALFA Extragalactic H i Source Catalog (2018, background): “…vary with environment (e.g. Moorman et al. 2014; Jones et al. 2016b, 2018), how the HI-bearing population differs from optically-selected ones (e.g. Huang et al. 2012a,b; Gavazzi et al. 2013), using the HI distribution to look for tidal debris on large angular scales (e.g. Lee-Waddell et al. 2014,…”
• CONSTRAINING THE LOW-MASS SLOPE OF THE STAR FORMATION SEQUENCE AT 0.5 < z < 2.5 (2014, background): “Local studies by Huang et al. (2012) suggest a transition mass of log(M /M ) ∼ 9.5 below which star formation scales differently with total stellar mass (also found by Salim et al. 2007; Gilbank et al. 2011), with a steeper slope.”
• The GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey - VIII. Final data release. The effect of group environment on the gas content of massive galaxies (2013, background): “…of their star formation, mass and structural properties, and across all environmental densities (e.g. Catinella et al. 2010; Huang et al. 2012), are necessary to explain the variety of systems observed today in the local Universe, and to provide important constraints to…”
• A DIRECT MEASUREMENT OF THE BARYONIC MASS FUNCTION OF GALAXIES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE GALACTIC BARYON FRACTION (2012, methodology): “The most notable difference is in the g − i color distribution, where the HI-selected sample shows a strong bias against the red galaxy population (see also Huang et al. 2012).”
• Is there a "too big to fail" problem in the field? (2014, methodology): “This can be seen directly by placing ALFALFA detections on a color-magnitude diagram (Huang et al. 2012, Fig.”
• (Almost) Dark Galaxies in the ALFALFA Survey: Isolated H i-bearing Ultra-diffuse Galaxies (2017, methodology): “The bottom panel of Figure 4 shows the H i mass - stellar mass scaling relation for H i selected galaxies from Huang et al. (2012).”
• ELVIS: Exploring the Local Volume in Simulations (2013, methodology): “Specifically, we fit a power-law relation to the gas-rich dwarfs in the LG from McConnachie (2012), ensuring that the gas-fraction relation matches that found by Huang et al. (2012b) at higher masses: MHI = 7.7× 104M ( M?”
• xGASS: total cold gas scaling relations and molecular-to-atomic gas ratios of galaxies in the local Universe (2018, result): “This is consistent with the relation for H I-rich galaxies detected by ALFALFA, which shows a flattening only below M ∼ 108.5 M (Huang et al. 2012).”
• VALIDATION OF THE EQUILIBRIUM MODEL FOR GALAXY EVOLUTION TO z ∼ 3 THROUGH MOLECULAR GAS AND DUST OBSERVATIONS OF LENSED STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2013, background): “Not only do we know locally that the HI fractions increase as stellar masses decrease (Catinella et al. 2010, 2012; Cortese et al. 2011; Huang et al. 2012), it can also be expected that the gas surface densities are lower in the z > 2, logM∗/M⊙ ∼ 10 lensed galaxies than in others at the high-mass…”