The H i content of extremely metal-deficient blue compact dwarf galaxies

Abstract

We have obtained new HI observations with the 100m Green Bank Telescope (GBT) for a sample of 29 extremely metal-deficient star-forming Blue Compact Dwarf (BCD) galaxies, selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectral data base to be extremely metal-deficient (12+logO/H<7.6). Neutral hydrogen was detected in 28 galaxies, a 97% detection rate. Combining the HI data with SDSS optical spectra for the BCD sample and adding complementary galaxy samples from the literature to extend the metallicity and mass ranges, we have studied how the HI content of a galaxy varies with various global galaxian properties. There is a clear trend of increasing gas mass fraction with decreasing metallicity, mass and luminosity. We obtain the relation M(HI)/L(g)~L(g)^{-0.3}, in agreement with previous studies based on samples with a smaller luminosity range. The median gas mass fraction f(gas) for the GBT sample is equal to 0.94 while the mean gas mass fraction is 0.90+/-0.15, with a lower limit of ~0.65. The HI depletion time is independent of metallicity, with a large scatter around the median value of 3.4 Gyr. The ratio of the baryonic mass to the dynamical mass of the metal-deficient BCDs varies from 0.05 to 0.80, with a median value of ~0.2. About 65% of the BCDs in our sample have an effective yield larger than the true yield, implying that the neutral gas envelope in BCDs is more metal-deficient by a factor of 1.5-20, as compared to the ionized gas.