Cold gas properties of the Herschel Reference Survey - II. Molecular and total gas scaling relations

By A. Boselli, L. Cortese, M. Boquien, S. Boissier, B. Catinella, C. Lagos, A. Saintonge. 2014

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the properties of the cold gas component of the interstellar medium of the Herschel Reference Survey, a complete volumelimited (15. D. 25 Mpc), K-band-selected sample of galaxies spanning a wide range in morphological type (from ellipticals to dwarf irregulars) and stellar mass (10 9 . Mstar. 10 11 M⊙). The multifrequency data in our hands are used to trace the molecular gas mass distribution and the main scaling relations of the sample, which put strong constraints on galaxy formation simulations. We extend the main scaling relations concerning the total and the molecular gas component determined for massive galaxies (Mstar& 10 10 M⊙) from the COLD GASS survey down to stellar masses Mstar≃ 10 9 M⊙. As scaling variables we use the total stellar mass Mstar, the stellar surface density µstar, the specific star formation rate SSFR, and the metallicity o f the target galaxies. By comparing molecular gas masses determined using a constant or a luminosity dependent XCO conversion factor, we estimate the robustness of these scaling relations on the very uncertain assumptions used to transform CO line intensities into molecular gas masses. The molecular gas distribution of a K-band-selected sample is significantly di fferent from that of a far-infrared-selected sample since it includes a significantly smaller number of objects with M(H2). 6 10 9 M⊙. In spiral galaxies the molecular gas phase is only 2530% of the atomic gas. The analysis also indicates that the slope of the main scaling relations depends on the adopted conversion factor. Among the sampled relations, all those concerning M(gas)/Mstar are statistically significant and show little variation wit h XCO. We observe a significant correlation between M(H2)/Mstar and S S FR, M(H2)/M(Hi) and µstar, M(H2)/M(Hi), and 12+log(O/H) regardless of the adopted XCO. The total and molecular gas consumption timescales are anticorrelated with the specific star formation rate. The comparison of HRS and COLD GASS data indicates that some of the observed scaling relations are nonlinear.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c70d72f6355b79a7a745b11e706866eecfe0af7d

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Citations in the corpus

xGASS: total cold gas scaling relations and molecular-to-atomic gas ratios of galaxies in the local Universe (2018, methodology): “A similar trend with stellar mass was also found by the APEX Low-redshift Legacy Survey for MOlecular Gas (ALLSMOG, Bothwell et al. 2014) and the HRS (Boselli et al. 2014a), which both combined COLD GASS data with new observations probing stellar masses below 1010 M .”
xCOLD GASS: The Complete IRAM 30 m Legacy Survey of Molecular Gas for Galaxy Evolution Studies (2017, methodology): “…on M∗ in the xCOLD GASS sample is qualitatively similar to those observed previously in the 109 − 1011.5M stellar mass range by combining the COLD GASS data with CO observations from the Herschel Reference Survey (Boselli et al. 2014) and from ALLSMOG (Bothwell et al. 2014; Cicone et al. 2017).”
Molecular hydrogen abundances of galaxies in the EAGLE simulations (2015, background): “…are available for relatively large samples of local galaxies (running into the hundreds), enabling the characterization of scaling relations between the cold gas and the stellar mass content (e.g. Bothwell, Kennicutt & Lee 2009; Catinella et al. 2010; Saintonge et al. 2011; Boselli et al. 2014).”
GASP. I. Gas Stripping Phenomena in Galaxies with MUSE (2017, background): “Conclusions from molecular studies are more debated, but overall the molecular gas seems to be removed in clusters, though less efficiently than the atomic gas (cf. Kenney & Young 1989 and Boselli et al. 1997, 2014).”