Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/229420

Title

The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA survey I: science goals, survey design, and strategy

Author(s)

Giovanelli, Riccardo;  Haynes, Martha P.;  Kent, Brian R.;  Perillat, Philip;  Saintonge, Amelie;  Brosch, Noah;  Catinella, Barbara;  Hoffman, G. Lyle;  Stierwalt, Sabrina;  Spekkens, Kristine;  Lerner, Mikael S.;  Masters, Karen L.;  Momjian, Emmanuel;  Rosenberg, Jessica L.;  Springob, Christopher M.;  Boselli, Alessandro;  Charmandaris, Vassilis;  Darling, Jeremy K.;  Davies, Jonathan;  Garcia Lambas, Diego;  Gavazzi, Giuseppe;  Giovanardi, Carlo;  Hardy, Eduardo;  Hunt, Leslie K.;  Iovino, Angela;  Karachentsev, Igor D.;  Karachentseva, Valentina E.;  Koopmann, Rebecca A.;  Marinoni, Christian;  Minchin, Robert;  Muller, Erik;  Putman, Mary;  Pantoja, Carmen;  Salzer, John J.;  Scodeggio, Marco;  Skillman, Evan;  Solanes, Jose M.;  Valotto, Carlos;  van Driel, Wim;  van Zee, Liese

Abstract

The recently initiated Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey aims to map 7000 square degrees of the high galactic latitude sky visible from Arecibo, providing a HI line spectral database covering the redshift range between -1600 km/s and 18,000 km/s with 5 km/s resolution. Exploiting Arecibo's large collecting area and small beam size, ALFALFA is specifically designed to probe the faint end of the HI mass function in the local universe and will provide a census of HI 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 and nearby superclusters, will allow measurement of the HI diameter function, and enable a first wide-area blind search for local HI tidal features, HI 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 five 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 which 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 HI line sources out to z=0.06, including several hundred with HI masses of less than 10^{7.5} msun.

Publication type

Journal article

Source

Astronomical Journal, Vol. 130, no. 6 (Dec 2005), pp. 2598-2612

Publication year

2005

FOR Code(s)

0201 Astronomical and Space Sciences

Keyword(s)

Distances;  Galaxies;  Haloes;  Luminosity function;  Mass function;  Photometry;  Radio lines;  Red shift;  Spiral galaxies;  Surveys

Publisher

Institute of Physics Publishing

ISSN

0004-6256

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/497431

Copyright

Copyright © 2005 The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. The American Astronomical Society does not allow Swinburne Research Bank to archive either the accepted manuscript or the published version of the article. However you can find an earlier version of the full text here: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0508301

Peer reviewed