Estimating the H I gas fractions of galaxies in the local Universe

Abstract

We use a sample of 800 galaxies with H I mass measurements from the HyperLeda catalogue and optical photometry from the fourth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to calibrate a new photometric estimator of the H I to-stellar mass ratio for nearby galaxies. Our estimator, which is motivated by the Kennicutt-Schmidt star formation law, is log(G_{HI}/S) = -1.73238(g-r) + 0.215182mu_i - 4.08451, where mu_i is the i-band surface brighteness and g-r is the optical colour estimated from the g- and r-band Petrosian apparent agnitudes. This estimator has a scatter of sigma = 0.31 dex in log(G_{HI}/S), compared to sigma ~ 0.4 dex for previous estimators that were based on colour alone. We investigate whether the residuals in our estimate of log(G_{HI}/S) depend in a systematic way on a variety of different galaxy properties. We find no effect as a function of stellar mass or 4000A break strength, but there is a systematic effect as a function of the concentration index of the light. We then apply our estimator to a sample of 10^5 emission-line galaxies in the SDSS DR4 and derive an estimate of the H I mass function, which is in excellent agreement with recent results from H I blind surveys. Finally, we re-examine the well-known relation between gas-phase metallicity and stellar mass and ask whether there is a dependence on H I-to-stellar mass ratio, as predicted by chemical evolution models. We do find that gas-poor galaxies are more metal rich at fixed stellar mass. We compare our results with the semi-analytic models of De Lucia & Blaizot, which include supernova feedback, as well as the cosmological infall of gas.