THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY: THE α.40 H i SOURCE CATALOG, ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE DERIVATION OF THE H i MASS FUNCTION

By M. Haynes, R. Giovanelli, A. Saintonge, Shan Huang, B. Kent, Rebecca A. Koopman, E. Papastergis, S. Stierwalt, T. Balonek, D. Craig and 15 more. 2011

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We present a current catalog of 21 cm H i line sources extracted from the Arecibo Legacy Fast Arecibo L-band Feed Array (ALFALFA) survey over ∼2800 deg2 of sky: the α.40 catalog. Covering 40% of the final survey area, the α.40 catalog contains 15,855 sources in the regions 07h30m  < R.A. < 16h30m, +04° < decl. <+16°, and +24° < decl. <+28° and 22h  < R.A. < 03h, +14° < decl. <+16°, and +24° < decl. < + 32°. Of those, 15,041 are certainly extragalactic, yielding a source density of 5.3 galaxies per deg2, a factor of 29 improvement over the catalog extracted from the H i Parkes All-Sky Survey. In addition to the source centroid positions, H i line flux densities, recessional velocities, and line widths, the catalog includes the coordinates of the most probable optical counterpart of each H i line detection, and a separate compilation provides a cross-match to identifications given in the photometric and spectroscopic catalogs associated with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7. Fewer than 2% of the extragalactic H i line sources cannot be identified with a feasible optical counterpart; some of those may be rare OH megamasers at 0.16 < z  < 0.25. A detailed analysis is presented of the completeness, width-dependent sensitivity function and bias inherent of the α.40 catalog. The impact of survey selection, distance errors, current volume coverage, and local large-scale structure on the derivation of the H i mass function is assessed. While α.40 does not yet provide a completely representative sampling of cosmological volume, derivations of the H i mass function using future data releases from ALFALFA will further improve both statistical and systematic uncertainties.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

• UPDATED NEARBY GALAXY CATALOG (2013, background): “…new dwarf galaxies within the SDSS optical sky survey (Abazajian et al. 2009), the HIPASS (Wong et al. 2006), ALFALFA (Giovanelli et al. 2005, Haynes et al. 2011), and Westerbork (Kovaĉ et al. 2009) HI surveys of the northern sky, and as a result of systematic search – 6 – for dwarf…”
• Is there a "too big to fail" problem in the field? (2014, methodology): “We measure galaxy rotational velocities using data from thepublicly available catalog of the ALFALFA survey, which covers about 40% of the final survey area (“α.40” catalog; Haynes et al. 2011).”
• (Almost) Dark Galaxies in the ALFALFA Survey: Isolated H i-bearing Ultra-diffuse Galaxies (2017, methodology): “ALFALFA Data The ALFALFA observations, data reduction, and catalog products are detailed elsewhere (e.g. Giovanelli et al. 2005; Saintonge 2007; Haynes et al. 2011).”
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Instrument specification and target selection (2014, background): “The typical rms noise limit of ALFALFA is ∼2.4 mJy/beam at a velocity resolution of 10 km s−1 (Haynes et al. 2011), corresponding to a 6.5σ limit (Saintonge 2007) in Hi gas mass of ∼1×1010 M⊙ at z =0.05, for a velocity width of 200 km s −1.”
• Illuminating Low Surface Brightness Galaxies with the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, methodology): “2 refers to low signal-to-noise ratio H I detections with optical counterparts whose (optical) redshifts are consistent with the H I line measurements (Haynes et al. 2011).”
• GALAXIES AT THE EXTREMES: ULTRA-DIFFUSE GALAXIES IN THE VIRGO CLUSTER (2015, background): “A search for the galaxies in other datasets finds they are undetected both in deep 21-cm ALFALFA data (Haynes et al. 2011) and far-UV GALEX imaging; coupled with their diffuse nature and lack of strong Hα emission (A. Watkins, private communication), this suggests they are not actively forming…”
• The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: the importance of the hydrodynamics scheme (2015, methodology): “As a point of reference, we show the best-fitting Schechter functions to the data of Haynes et al. (2011) (ALFALFA survey) and Zwaan et al. (2003) (HIPASS survey).”
• THE UNIVERSAL RELATION OF GALACTIC CHEMICAL EVOLUTION: THE ORIGIN OF THE MASS–METALLICITY RELATION (2014, methodology): “Gas Mass Data The HI gas mass measurements are taken from the Arecibo Fast Alfa Survey (ALFALFA; Haynes et al. 2011).”
• THE NEXT GENERATION VIRGO CLUSTER SURVEY (NGVS). I. INTRODUCTION TO THE SURVEY (2012, background): “Perhaps most relevant for the NGVS, because of its higher sensitivity and spatial resolution, is the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey (ALFALFA; Giovanelli et al. 2005; Kent 2008; Haynes et al. 2011).”
• ELVIS: Exploring the Local Volume in Simulations (2013, methodology): “…presented a catalogue of ultra-compact high velocity clouds (UCVHCs) extracted from the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA; Giovanelli et al. 2005; Haynes et al. 2011) survey and discussed the possibility that some of these objects may be dwarf galaxies (see also Blitz et al. 1999; Faerman et al.…”
• The Romulus cosmological simulations: a physical approach to the formation, dynamics and accretion models of SMBHs (2016, background): “…is graded against a set of z = 0 empirical scaling relations that govern star formation efficiency (Moster et al. 2013), the gas depletion time (Cannon et al. 2011; Haynes et al. 2011), galaxy size and angular momentum (Obreschkow & Glazebrook 2014), and SMBH growth (Schramm & Silverman 2013).”
• THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY: THE GALAXY POPULATION DETECTED BY ALFALFA (2012, methodology): “The 2011 ALFALFA catalog, ‘α.40’, covers∼ 40% of the final targeted sky area (Haynes et al. 2011), giving HI masses, systemic velocities and HI line widths for∼16000 high quality detections (§2.1).”
• Molecular and atomic gas along and across the main sequence of star-forming galaxies (2016, background): “The most gas-rich galaxies in the sample are already detected in the ALFALFA survey (Giovanelli et al. 2005; Haynes et al. 2011) and therefore not reobserved.”
• THE IMPACT OF INTERACTIONS, BARS, BULGES, AND ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI ON STAR FORMATION EFFICIENCY IN LOCAL MASSIVE GALAXIES (2012, methodology): “The sample is selected in the redshift range 0.025 < z < 0.050 from the SDSS DR6 spectroscopic survey, in the area of sky that overlaps with the GALEX MIS (Martin et al. 2005) and the ALFALFA HI survey (Giovanelli et al. 2005; Haynes et al. 2011).”
• A fundamental relation between the metallicity, gas content, and stellar mass of local galaxies (2013, methodology): “AM and FM acknowledge support from grant PRIN-MIUR 2010-2011 ‘The dark Universe and the cosmic evolution of baryons: from current surveys to Euclid’.”
• A DIRECT MEASUREMENT OF THE BARYONIC MASS FUNCTION OF GALAXIES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE GALACTIC BARYON FRACTION (2012, methodology): “We remove from our sample 204 α.40 sources which are not crossmatched with an optical source in SDSS, as well as 208 additional sources which have been flagged as having problematic SDSS photometry (crossmatch code “P” in α.40, for details see Section 4 in Haynes et al. 2011).”