The HI Mass Function Derived from the 20% ALFALFA Survey

Details The HI Mass Function Derived from the 20% ALFALFA Survey The HI Mass Function Derived from the 20% ALFALFA Survey

Jan 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21348102m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #481.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.448

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ALFALFA is an ongoing second-generation blind HI survey using the new seven-pixel ALFA receiver at Arecibo. When completed, the survey will cover 7,000 deg^2 of high-galactic latitude sky, detecting the hydrogen in local galaxies out to cz 0.06. ALFALFA is sensitive to an HI mass of 10^7 solar masses at the distance of the Virgo Cluster, and is on track to detect > 25,000 galaxies, of which roughly 60% will be new HI detections and redshifts. The increased sensitivity of ALFALFA compared to first-generation blind HI surveys probes a cosmologically significant volume and completes a census of HI-rich objects. We now have available a contiguous catalog of extragalactic sources representing 20% of the final ALFALFA sky area. This catalog, which covers the region 07h30m < RA (J2000) < 16h30m and 4 deg < Dec (J2000) < 16 deg, contains 6000 HI rich galaxies, surpassing the full HIPASS sample. We present a preliminary measurement of the HI mass function (HIMF) and an estimate of Omega_HI using this large-scale catalog. In particular, ALFALFA is able to robustly measure the faint-end slope of the HIMF, where current measurements disagree by an order of magnitude near 10^6 solar masses. Our catalog contains on the order of 300 galaxies with HI masses less than 10^8 solar masses, compared to a few tens in all previous blind HIMF measurements combined. This estimate of the HIMF includes corrections for large-scale structure and the selection function of ALFALFA, which depends not only on flux (the combination of mass and distance) but on the velocity width of the HI profile. Future work will probe the dependence of the HIMF as a function of environment. his work supported in part by NSF grant AST-0607007, by an NDSEG fellowship, and by a Brinson Foundation grant.

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