The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey. I. Science Goals, Survey Design, and Strategy

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.; VALOTTO, CARLOS

ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2005 vol. 130 p. 2598 - 2612

0004-6256

The recently initiated Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey aims to map ~7000 deg2 of the high Galactic latitude sky visible from Arecibo, providing a H I line spectral database covering the redshift range between -1600 and 18,000 km s-1 with ~5 km s-1 resolution. Exploiting Arecibo´s large collecting area and small beam size, ALFALFA is specifically designed to probe the faint end of the H I mass function in the local universe and will provide a census of H I 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 Supercluster and nearby superclusters, allow measurement of the H I diameter function, and enable a first wide-area blind search for local H I tidal features, H I absorbers at z