Mary E. Putman

THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY. I. SCIENCE GOALS, SURVEY DESIGN, AND STRATEGY

The recently initiated Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey aims to map ~7000 deg2 of the high Galactic latitude sky visible from Arecibo, providing a H I line spectral database covering the redshift range between -1600 and 18,000 km s-1 with ~5 km s-1 resolution. Exploiting Arecibos large collecting area and small beam size, ALFALFA is specifically designed to probe the faint end of the H I mass function in the local universe and will provide a census of H I in the surveyed sky area to faint flux limits, making it especially useful in synergy with wide-area surveys conducted at other wavelengths. ALFALFA will also provide the basis for studies of the dynamics of galaxies within the Local Supercluster and nearby superclusters, allow measurement of the H I diameter function, and enable a first wide-area blind search for local H I tidal features, H I absorbers at z < 0.06, and OH megamasers in the redshift range 0.16 < z < 0.25. Although completion of the survey will require some 5 years, public access to the ALFALFA data and data products will be provided in a timely manner, thus allowing its application for studies beyond those targeted by the ALFALFA collaboration. ALFALFA adopts a two-pass, minimum intrusion, drift scan observing technique that samples the same region of sky at two separate epochs to aid in the discrimination of cosmic signals from noise and terrestrial interference. Survey simulations, which take into account large-scale structure in the mass distribution and incorporate experience with the ALFA system gained from tests conducted during its commissioning phase, suggest that ALFALFA will detect on the order of 20,000 extragalactic H I line sources out to z ~ 0.06, including several hundred with H I masses M < 107.5 M⊙.

The HIPASS catalogue - I. Data presentation

The H I Parkes All-Sky Survey (HIPASS) catalogue forms the largest uniform catalogue of H I sources compiled to date, with 4315 sources identified purely by their H I content. The catalogue data comprise the southern region δ< + 2 ◦ of HIPASS, the first blind H I survey to cover the entire southern sky. The rms noise for this survey is 13 mJy beam −1 and the velocity range is −1280 to 12 700 km s −1 . Data search, verification and parametrization methods are discussed along with a description of measured quantities. Full catalogue data are made available to the astronomical community including positions, velocities, velocity widths, integrated fluxes and peak flux densities. Also available are on-sky moment maps, position‐velocity moment maps and spectra of catalogue sources. A number of local large-scale features are observed in the space distribution of sources, including the super-Galactic plane and the Local Void. Notably, large-scale structure is seen at low Galactic latitudes, a region normally obscured at optical wavelengths.

The Magellanic Stream, high-velocity clouds and the sculptor group

The Magellanic Stream is a 100° × 10° filament of gas that lies within the Galactic halo and contains ~2 × 108 M☉ of neutral hydrogen. In this paper we present data from the H I Parkes All Sky Survey (HIPASS) in the first complete survey of the entire Magellanic Stream and its surroundings. We also present a summary of the reprocessing techniques used to recover large-scale structure in the Stream. The substantial improvement in spatial resolution and angular coverage compared to previous surveys reveals a variety of prominent features, including bifurcation along the main Stream filament; dense, isolated clouds that follow the entire length of the Stream; head-tail structures; and a complex filamentary web at the head of the Stream where gas is being freshly stripped away from the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Bridge. Debris that appears to be of Magellanic origin extends out to 20° from the main Stream filaments. The Magellanic Stream has a velocity gradient of 700 km s-1 from the Clouds to the tail of the Stream, ~390 km s-1 greater than that due to Galactic rotation alone, therefore implying a noncircular orbit. The dual filaments comprising the Stream are likely to be relics from gas stripped separately from the Magellanic Bridge and the SMC. This implies that (1) the Bridge is somewhat older than conventionally assumed; and (2) the Clouds have been bound together for at least one or two orbits. The transverse velocity gradient of the Stream also appears to support long-term binary motion of the Clouds. A significant number of the most elongated cataloged Stream clouds (containing ~1% of the Stream mass) have position angles aligned along the Stream. This suggests the presence of shearing motions within the Stream, arising from tidal forces or interaction with the tenuous Galactic halo. As previously noted, clouds within one region of the Stream, along the sight line to the less distant half (southern half on the sky) of the Sculptor Group, show anomalous properties. There are more clouds along this sight line than any other part of the Stream, and their velocity distribution significantly deviates from the gradient along the Stream. We argue that this deviation could be due to a combination of halo material, and not to distant Sculptor clouds, based on a spatial and kinematic comparison between the Sculptor Group galaxies and the anomalous clouds and the lack of cloud detection in the northern half of the group. This result has significant implications for the hypothesis that there might exist distant, massive high-velocity clouds within the Local Group. Cataloged clouds within the Magellanic Stream do not have a preferred scale size. Their mass spectrum f(M) M and column density spectrum f(N) N are steep compared with Lyα absorbers and galaxies, and similar to the anomalous clouds along the Sculptor Group sight line.

EVIDENCE FOR A NONUNIFORM INITIAL MASS FUNCTION IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE

Many of the results in modern astrophysics rest on the notion that the initial mass function (IMF) is universal. Our observations of a sample of H i selected galaxies in the light of Hα and the far-ultraviolet (FUV) challenge this result. The extinction-corrected flux ratio FHα/f FUV from these two tracers of star formation shows strong correlations with the surface brightness in Hα and the R band: low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies have lower FHα/f FUV ratios compared to high surface brightness galaxies as well as compared to expectations from equilibrium models of constant star formation rate (SFR) using commonly favored IMF parameters. Weaker but significant correlations of FHα/f FUV with luminosity, rotational velocity, and dynamical mass as well as a systematic trend with morphology, are found. The correlated variations of FHα/f FUV with other global parameters are thus part of the larger family of galaxy scaling relations. The FHα/f FUV correlations cannot be due to residual extinction correction errors, while systematic variations in the star formation history (SFH) cannot explain the trends with both Hα and R surface brightness nor with other global properties. The possibility that LSB galaxies have a higher escape fraction of ionizing photons seems inconsistent with their high gas fraction, and observations of color–magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of a few systems which indicate a real deficit of O stars. The most plausible explanation for the correlations is the systematic variations of the upper mass limit Mu and/or the slope γ which define the upper end of the IMF. We outline a scenario of pressure driving the correlations by setting the efficiency of the formation of the dense star clusters where the highest mass stars preferentially form. Our results imply that the SFR measured in a galaxy is highly sensitive to the tracer used in the measurement. A nonuniversal IMF would also call into question the interpretation of metal abundance patterns in dwarf galaxies as well as SFHs derived from CMDs.

The Parkes HI survey of the Magellanic System

We present the first fully and uniformly sampled, spatially complete

Hα Emission from High-Velocity Clouds and Their Distances

\ion{H}{i}

The 1000 brightest hipass galaxies: The HI mass function and Omega(HI)

survey of the entire Magellanic System with high velocity resolution (

The Survey for Ionization in Neutral Gas Galaxies. I. Description and Initial Results

\Delta v = 1.0

The Northern HIPASS catalogue – data presentation, completeness and reliability measures

km s -1 ), performed with the Parkes Telescope. Approximately 24 percent of the southern sky was covered by this survey on a ≈ 5´ grid with an angular resolution of

THE FATE OF HIGH-VELOCITY CLOUDS: WARM OR COLD COSMIC RAIN?

{\it HPBW} = 14\farcm1