The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey: The ALFALFA Extragalactic HI Source Catalog
Abstract
We present the catalog of ~31500 extragalactic HI line sources detected by the completed ALFALFA survey out to z < 0.06 including both high signal-to-noise ratio (> 6.5) detections and ones of lower quality which coincide in both position and recessional velocity with galaxies of known redshift. We review the observing technique, data reduction pipeline, and catalog construction process, focusing on details of particular relevance to understanding the catalog's compiled parameters. We further describe and make available the digital HI line spectra associated with the catalogued sources. In addition to the extragalactic HI line detections, we report nine confirmed OH megamasers and ten OH megamaser candidates at 0.16 < z < 0.22 whose OH line signals are redshifted into the ALFALFA frequency band. Because of complexities in data collection and processing associated with the use of a feed-horn array on a complex single-dish antenna in the terrestrial radio frequency interference environment, we also present a list of suggestions and caveats for consideration by users of the ALFALFA extragalactic catalog for future scientific investigations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1805.11499,
title = {The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey: The ALFALFA Extragalactic HI Source Catalog},
author = {Martha P. Haynes and Riccardo Giovanelli and Brian R. Kent and Elizabeth A. K. Adams and Thomas J. Balonek and David W. Craig and Derek Fertig and Rose Finn and Carlo Giovanardi and Gregory Hallenbeck and Kelley M. Hess and G. Lyle Hoffman and Shan Huang and Michael G. Jones and Rebecca A. Koopmann and David A. Kornreich and Lukas Leisman and Jeffrey R. Miller and Crystal Moorman and Jessica O'Connor and Aileen O'Donoghue and Emmanouil Papastergis and Parker Troischt and David Stark and Li Xiao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.11499},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
24 pages 8 figures See http://egg.astro.cornell.edu/alfalfa/data for ASCII and CSV datafiles corresponding to Table 2. To appear in Astrophys.J.Suppl