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Published November 2011 | Published
Journal Article Open

The Arecibo Legacy Fast Alfa Survey: The α.40 HI Source Catalog, its Characteristics and Their Impact on the Derivation of the Hi Mass Function

Abstract

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 deg^2 of sky: the α.40 catalog. Covering 40% of the final survey area, the α.40 catalog contains 15,855 sources in the regions 07^h30^m < R.A. < 16^h30^m, +04° < decl. <+16°, and +24° < decl. <+28° and 22^h < R.A. < 03^h, +14° < decl. <+16°, and +24° < decl. < + 32°. Of those, 15,041 are certainly extragalactic, yielding a source density of 5.3 galaxies per deg^2, 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.

Additional Information

© 2011 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2011 June 28; accepted 2011 August 28; published 2011 October 17. We thank the staff of the Arecibo Observatory, particularly Phil Perillat, Ganesh Rajagopalan, Arun Venkataraman, Hector Hernandez, and the telescope operations staff, for their invaluable help in support of the acquisition of the data used to produce this catalog, and Tom Shannon and Adam Brazier for their critical support of hardware and database development at Cornell. This work has been supported by the NSF grant AST-0607007 to R.G. and M.P.H. and by a Brinson Foundation grant. T.J.B., D.W.C., G.L.H., S.J.U.H., D.A.K., R.A.K., J.R.M., A.A.O., R.P.O., J.L.R., and E.M.W. acknowledge support for the Undergraduate ALFALFA Team from NSF grants AST-0724918, AST-0725267, AST-0725380, AST-0902211, and AST0903394. J.L.R. acknowledges support from NSFAST-000167932. K.S. acknowledges support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). This research has made use of data obtained from or software provided by the US National Virtual Observatory, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and of Montage, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Earth Science Technology Office, Computation Technologies Project, under Cooperative Agreement Number NCC5-626 between NASA and the California Institute of Technology. Montage is maintained by the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive. We acknowledge the use of NASA's SkyView facility (http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov) located at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Digitized Sky Surveys were produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions. The Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II) was made by the California Institute of Technology with funds from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Sloan Foundation, the Samuel Oschin Foundation, and the Eastman Kodak Corporation. Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the participating institutions, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of energy, the NASA, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The SDSSWeb site is http://www.sdss.org/. The SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the participating institutions. The participating institutions are the American Museum of Natural History, Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, University of Basel, University of Cambridge, Case Western Reserve University,University of Chicago, Drexel University, Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, the Korean Scientist Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (LAMOST), Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, the MPA, New Mexico State University, Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the United States Naval Observatory, and the University of Washington.

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