ALFALFA

ALFALFA Team Project

Proposal Title: Discovery and basic HI properties of the most luminous late-type spiral galaxies in the local Universe.
Project Leader: Paolo Salucci
Institution: SISSA
Other Co-Authors: Irina Yegorova, Christiane Martins Frigerio (SISSA) + 1 student thesis
Uli Klein, Gyula Jozsa (AIfA, Bonn) + 1 thesis student
Alessandro Pizzella (Padova)
Time frame: 2007--


Description: (up to ~ 500 words)

The investigations of the structure and kinematics of disk galaxies, aimed to understand them in a cosmological context, are now strongly pointing to "fringe" objects, i.e. to late type spirals with Vmax > 250 km/s. These are in fact the biggest disks, with Mdisk > 2 X 1011 Msolar, that the galaxy formation process delivers. It is reckoned that the observational properties of these objects constrain the theoretical scenario of galaxy formation in several aspects such as the inner profile of the DM halo, the disks' angular momentum, the supernova and the AGN feedbacks. ALFALFA is set up to discover several tens of these rare objects above a limiting flux of 1 Jy-km/s and above log w50 km/s ~2.5, corresponding to the upper right portion of Fig. 6c in Giovanelli et al. (ApJ 133, 2569, 2007). This will provide us with crucial information about their HI distribution and their dynamical properties. It will guide us and foster the subsequent optical-HI kinematical and photometric follow-ups, some of them already planned, that will probe the extremes of the galaxy formation process, imprinted in these big galaxies. In detail, for the large spirals discovered by ALFALFA we will aim to obtain for about 15 objects: New data will be available within one year; this work is part of two theses to be presented in three years time. We plan one publication within 1 year and 4 publications within 2 years. Data of the follow-up will be available to other members as obtained if used for projects different from ours. At the same time we are totally open to people who want to join our project. We like to include members of the ALFALFA team in the project.


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Last modified: Sat Aug 18 11:25:47 EDT 2007 by martha