The HI Mass Function of Galaxies from a Deep Survey in the 21cm Line

The HI mass function (HIMF) for galaxies in the local universe is constructed from the results of the Arecibo HI Strip Survey, a blind extragalactic survey in the 21cm line. The survey consists of two strips covering in total 65 square degrees of sky, with a depth of cz = 7400 km/s and was optimized to detect column densities of neutral gas N_HI > 10^18 cm^-2 (5 sigma). The survey yielded 66 significant extragalactic signals of which approximately 50% are cataloged galaxies. No free floating HI clouds without stars are found. VLA follow-up observations of all signals have been used to obtain better measurements of the positions and fluxes and allow an alternate determination of the achieved survey sensitivity. The resulting HIMF has a shallow faint end slope (alpha ~ 1.2), and is consistent with earlier estimates computed for the population of optically selected gas rich galaxies. This implies that there is not a large population of gas rich low luminosity or low surface brightness galaxies that has gone unnoticed by optical surveys. The cosmological mass density of HI at the present time determined from the survey, Omega_HI = (2.0 +/- 0.5) x 10^-4, is in good agreement with earlier estimates. We determine lower limits to the average column densities of the galaxies detected in the survey and find that none of the galaxies have below 10^19.7 cm^-2, although there are no observational selection criteria against finding lower density systems.Comment: 34 pages, including 8 figures. To appear in The Astrophysical Journa