LOW SURFACE BRIGHTNESS GALAXIES SELECTED FROM THE 40% SKY AREA OF THE ALFALFA H i SURVEY. I. SAMPLE AND STATISTICAL PROPERTIES

Abstract

The population of Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies is crucial for understanding the extremes of galaxy formation and evolution of the universe. As LSB galaxies are mostly rich in gas (HI), the alpha.40-SDSS DR7 sample is absolutely one of the best survey combinations to select a sample of them in the local Universe. Since the sky backgrounds are systematically overestimated for galaxy images by the SDSS photometric pipeline, particularly for luminous galaxies or galaxies with extended low surface brightness outskirts, in this paper, we above all estimated the sky backgrounds of SDSS images in the alpha.40-SDSS DR7 sample, using a precise method of sky subtraction. Once subtracting the sky background, we did surface photometry with the Kron elliptical aperture and fitted geometric parameters with an exponential profile model for each galaxy image. Basing on the photometric and geometric results, we further calculated the B-band central surface brightness, mu_{0}(B), for each galaxy and ultimately defined a sample of LSB galaxies consisting of 1129 galaxies with mu_{0}(B) > 22.5 mag arcsec^{-2} and the minor-to-major axis ratio b/a > 0.3. This HI-selected LSB galaxy sample from the alpha.40-SDSS DR7 is a relatively unbiased sample of gas-rich and disk-dominated LSB galaxies, which is complete both in HI observation and the optical magnitude within the limit of SDSS DR7 photometric survey. We made analysis on optical and radio 21cm HI properties of this LSB galaxy sample. Additionally, we statistically investigated the environment of our LSB galaxies, and found that up to 92% of the total LSB galaxies have less than 8 neighbouring galaxies, which strongly evidenced that LSB galaxies prefer to reside in the low-density environment.