H i deficiencies and asymmetries in HIPASS galaxies

Abstract

ABSTRACT We present an analysis of the sky distribution of neutral hydrogen (H i) deficiency and spectral asymmetry for galaxies detected by the H i Parkes All-Sky Survey (HIPASS) as a function of projected environment density. Previous studies of galaxy H i deficiency using HIPASS were sensitive to galaxies that are extremely H i rich or poor. We use an updated binning statistic for measuring the global sky distribution of H i deficiency that is sensitive to the average deficiencies. Our analysis confirms the result from previous studies that galaxies residing in denser environments, such as Virgo, are on average more H i deficient than galaxies at lower densities. However, many other individual groups and clusters are not found to be on average significantly H i poor, in contradiction to previous work. In terms of H i spectral asymmetries, we do not recover any significant trend of increasing asymmetry with environment density as found for other galaxy samples. We also investigate the correlation between H i asymmetry and deficiency, but find no variation in the mean asymmetry of galaxies that are H i rich, normal, or poor. This indicates that there is either no dependence of asymmetry on H i deficiency, or a galaxy’s H i deficiency only has a small influence on the measured H i asymmetry that we are unable to observe using only integrated spectra.