A GALEX ULTRAVIOLET IMAGING SURVEY OF GALAXIES IN THE LOCAL VOLUME

By Janice C. Lee, A. Gil de Paz, Robert C. Kennicutt Jr., M. Bothwell, J. J. Dalcanton, José G. Funes S. J., Benjamin D. Johnson, S. Sakai, E. Skillman, Christy A. Tremonti and 1 more. 2010

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We present results from a GALEX ultraviolet (UV) survey of a complete sample of 390 galaxies within ∼11 Mpc of the Milky Way. The UV data are a key component of the composite Local Volume Legacy, an ultraviolet-to-infrared imaging program designed to provide an inventory of dust and star formation in nearby spiral and irregular galaxies. The ensemble data set is an especially valuable resource for studying star formation in dwarf galaxies, which comprise over 80% of the sample. We describe the GALEX survey programs that obtained the data and provide a catalog of far-UV (∼1500 Å) and near-UV (∼2200 Å) integrated photometry. General UV properties of the sample are briefly discussed. We compute two measures of the global star formation efficiency, the star formation rate (SFR) per unit H i gas mass, and the SFR per unit stellar mass, to illustrate the significant differences that can arise in our understanding of dwarf galaxies when the FUV is used to measure the SFR instead of Hα. We find that dwarf galaxies may not be as drastically inefficient in converting gas into stars as suggested by prior Hα studies. In this context, we also examine the UV properties of late-type dwarf galaxies that appear to be devoid of star formation because they were not detected in previous Hα narrowband observations. Nearly all such galaxies in our sample are detected in the FUV and have FUV SFRs that fall below the limit where the Hα flux is robust to Poisson fluctuations in the formation of massive stars. Otherwise, the UV colors and star formation efficiencies of Hα-undetected, UV-bright dwarf irregulars appear to be relatively unremarkable with respect to those exhibited by the general population of star-forming galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa8c1315aa19769755ce69eb79794dbd95c7001e

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Citations in the corpus

THE STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF LOCAL GROUP DWARF GALAXIES. I. HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/WIDE FIELD PLANETARY CAMERA 2 OBSERVATIONS (2014, background): “Most constraints on star formation efficiency for low mass galaxies come from studies of recent star formation (e.g., Hα, UV, 24 µm) and current gas content (e.g., Leroy et al. 2008; Salim et al. 2007; Kennicutt et al. 2008; Lee et al. 2011; Kennicutt & Evans 2012).”
An uncertainty principle for star formation - I. Why galactic star formation relations break down below a certain spatial scale (2014, methodology): “Next to the statistical sampling in time and space of the full SF process, additional scatter is introduced by the incomplete sampling of the SF tracer at low SFRs (Lee et al. 2011; Fumagalli, da Silva & Krumholz 2011).”
DIRECT OXYGEN ABUNDANCES FOR LOW-LUMINOSITY LVL GALAXIES (2012, methodology): “The LVL is leveraged by ancillary data including Hα (Kennicutt et al. 2008) and UV (Lee et al. 2011) imaging from the 11 Mpc Hα and Ultraviolet Galaxy Survey (11HUGS; Lee et al. 2011) and the Nearby Galaxy Survey (NGS; Gil de Paz et al. 2007).”
UPDATED NEARBY GALAXY CATALOG (2013, methodology): “For 295 galaxies the asymptotic mFUV magnitudes were taken from Lee et al. (2011) and are presented in Table 3 without correction for Galactic extinction.”
Star Formation in the Milky Way and Nearby Galaxies (2012, methodology): “In such regions that emission at all wavelengths will be dominated by a very young population with ages of typically a few Myr, which will be shorter than the averaging times assumed for all but the emission-line tracers.”