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Aims: We are using the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA survey (ALFALFA), which is covering 17% of the sky at 21 cm, to study the HI content of Early-Type galaxies (ETG) in an unbiased way. The aim is to get an overall picture of the hot, warm and cold ISM of ETG, as a function of galaxy mass and environment, to understand its origin and fate, and to relate it to the formation and evolution history of these objects. Methods: This paper deals with the first part of our study, which is devoted to the 8-16 deg. declination strip in the Virgo cluster. In this sky region, using the Virgo Cluster Catalogue (VCC), we have defined an optical sample of 939 ETG, 457 of which are brighter than the VCC completeness limit at B_T=18.0. We have correlated this optical sample with the catalogue of detected HI sources from ALFALFA. Results: Out of the 389 ETG from the VCC with B_T<=18.0, outside the 1 deg. region of poor HI detection around M87, and corrected for background contamination of VCC galaxies without a known radial velocity, only 9 galaxies (2.3%) are detected in HI with a completeness limit of 3.5 and 7.6 x 10^7 Mo of HI for dwarf and giant ETG, respectively. In addition 4 VCC ETG with fainter magnitudes are also detected. Our HI detection rate is lower than previously claimed. The majority of the detected ETG appear to have peculiar morphology and to be located near the edges of the Virgo cluster. Conclusions: Our preliminary conclusion is that cluster ETG contain very little neutral gas, with the exceptions of a few peculiar dwarf galaxies at the edge of the ETG classification and of very few larger ETG, where the cold gas could have a recent external origin.
The ALFALFA (Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA) blind survey is providing a census of HI in galaxies of all types in a range of environments. Here we report on ALFALFA results for Virgo Cluster early-type dwarfs between declinations of 4 and 16 degrees. Less than 2% of the Virgo early-type dwarf population is detected, compared to 70-80% of the Im/BCD dwarf population. Most of the dwarfs detected in HI show evidence for ongoing or recent star formation. Early-type galaxies with HI tend to be located in the outer regions of the cluster and to be brighter. Early-type dwarfs with HI may be undergoing morphological transition due to cluster environmental effects.
We present the analysis of the HI content of a sample of early-type galaxies (ETGs) in low-density environments (LDEs) using the data set provided by the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey. We compare their properties to the sample in the Virgo cluster that we studied in a previous paper (di Serego Alighieri et al. 2007, Paper I). We have selected a sample of 62 nearby ETGs (V< 3000 km/s) in an area of the sky where the ALFALFA data are already available (8h<RA<16h, 4 deg<DEC<16deg), avoiding the region of the Virgo cluster. Among these, 39 have absolute B magnitudes fainter than M_B = -17. Fifteen out of 62 galaxies have been firmly detected with ALFALFA (sim 25%). Five additional galaxies show a weaker HI emission (S/N sim 4) and they will need deeper observations to be confirmed. All together, our analysis doubles the number of known gas-rich ETGs in this area. The HI detection rate is 44% in luminous ETGs (M_B < -17) and 13% in dwarf ETGs (M_B > -17). In both cases it is 10 times higher than that of the Virgo cluster. The presence of gas can be related to a recent star formation activity: 60% of all ETGs with HI have optical emission line ratios typical of star-forming galaxies and blue colours suggesting the presence of young stellar populations, especially in the dwarf subsample. We show that the HI detection rate of ETGs depends both on the environment and mass. The fraction of early-type systems with neutral hydrogen is higher in more massive objects when compared to early-type dwarfs. The ETGs in LDEs seem to have more heterogeneous properties than their Virgo cluster counterparts, since they are able to retain a cold interstellar gas component and to support star formation activity even at recent epochs.
We extend our published work on the neutral hydrogen content of early-type galaxies in the Virgo cluster using the catalogue of detected sources from the ALFALFA survey, by showing the 21cm spectra of all the detected galaxies and discussing a deeper analysis of the ALFALFA datacubes, searching for lower S/N sources. A view of the multiphase interstellar medium of M86 is also presented, by comparing images of the cold, warm and hot phases.
We use a stacking technique to measure the average HI content of a volume-limited sample of 1871 AGN host galaxies from a parent sample of galaxies selected from the SDSS and GALEX imaging surveys with stellar masses greater than 10^10 M_sun and redshifts in the range 0.025<z<0.05. HI data are available from the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey. In previous work, we found that the HI gas fraction in galaxies correlates most strongly with the combination of optical/UV colour and stellar surface mass density. We therefore build a control sample of non-AGN matched to the AGN hosts in these two properties. We study trends in HI gas mass fraction (M(HI)/M_*), where M_* is the stellar mass) as a function of black hole accretion rate indicator L[OIII]/M(BH). We find no significant difference in HI content between AGN and control samples at all values of black hole accretion rate probed by the galaxies in our sample. This indicates that AGN do not influence the large-scale gaseous properties of galaxies in the local Universe. We have studied the variation in HI mass fraction with black hole accretion rate in the blue and red galaxy populations. In the blue population, the HI gas fraction is independent of accretion rate, indicating that accretion is not sensitive to the properties of the interstellar medium of the galaxy on large scales. However, in the red population accretion rate and gas fraction do correlate. The measured gas fractions in this population are not too different from the ones expected from a stellar mass loss origin, implying that the fuel supply in the red AGN population could be a mixture of mass loss from stars and gas present in disks.
We have carried out an HI stacking analysis of a volume-limited sample of ~5000 galaxies with imaging and spectroscopic data from GALEX and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which lie within the current footprint of the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) Survey. Our galaxies are selected to have stellar masses greater than 10^10 Msun and redshifts in the range 0.025<z<0.05. We extract a sub-sample of 1833 early-type galaxies with inclinations less than 70deg, with concentration indices C>2.6 and with light profiles that are well fit by a De Vaucouleurs model. We then stack HI line spectra extracted from the ALFALFA data cubes at the 3-D positions of the galaxies from these two samples in bins of stellar mass, stellar mass surface density, central velocity dispersion, and NUV-r colour. We use the stacked spectra to estimate the average HI gas fractions M_HI/M_* of the galaxies in each bin. Our main result is that the HI content of a galaxy is not influenced by its bulge. The average HI gas fractions of galaxies in both our samples correlate most strongly with NUV-r colour and with stellar surface density. The relation between average HI fraction and these two parameters is independent of concentration index C. We have tested whether the average HI gas content of bulge-dominated galaxies on the red sequence, differs from that of late-type galaxies on the red sequence. We find no evidence that galaxies with a significant bulge component are less efficient at turning their available gas reservoirs into stars. This result is in contradiction with the morphological quenching scenario proposed by Martig et al. (2009).