SFR catalogue

Summary

This catalogue contains star formation rate estimates for > 250000 galaxies from the DR2 obtained as described in Brinchmann, J. et al 2004, in press for MNRAS, "The physical properties of star-forming galaxies in the low-redshift Universe ". Please pay attention to the cautions before using the catalogue

About the catalogue

The catalogue contains all galaxies we have examined in the DR2 and contains 261054 entries in the same order as the emission line catalogue It is thus a super-set of the galaxies used in Brinchmann et al (2004).

This means that the user must show some caution in using the catalogue. In particular it is not advisable to use any SFRs measured for galaxies that do not have a stellar mass >10^5 in the stellar mass catalogue - because of the way SFRs are estimated for AGNs and Composites this would leave you with a biased sample. This leaves 211864 galaxies with estimates of SFR within the fibre and a total of 210705 with estimates of total SFRs (the two numbers are not equal because a few galaxies have problematic photometry)

In some cases the aperture corrections do fail. These have not been removed from this catalogue as it may be useful to know about them. They can almost always be indentified as galaxies where the mode and average estimate of the SFR differ by more than a factor of 20.

The cosmology used for all below is h=0.7, omega_M=0.3 and omega_L=0.7.

As discussed by Brinchmann et al (2004) we use the full likelihood distributions of the SFRs in our calculations, but for compactness we have here summarised these into medians, 2.5, 16, 84 and 97.5 percentiles as well as the mode and average of the distributions. This suffices for most applications. If you want access to the full likelihoods, get in touch with jarle at astro.up.pt.

Files available

The full summarised data is available in the binary FITS tables with select columns also included in the text files below.

sfr_fib.fit.gz. FITS binary table containing the results for the log SFR inside the fibre. The columns are as follows:

  MEDIAN - The median of the likelihood distribution for Log SFR
  P16    - 16% c.f. level of same
  P84    - 84%
  P2P5   - 2.5%
  P97P5  - 97.5%
  MODE   - Mode of likelihood distribution - discrete so binning
           sensitive.
  AVG    - Average of distribution - somewhat binning sensitive

sfr_tot.fit.gz. FITS binary table containing the results for the total log SFR. Columns as above.
specsfr_fib.fit.gz. FITS binary table containing the results for log SFR/M* estimate inside the fibre. Columns as above.
specsfr_tot.fit.gz. FITS binary table containing the estimate of the total log SFR/M*. Columns as above.

sfr_info.fit.gz. FITS binary table containing various information about the SFR files. The columns are as follows:

  PLATEID - SDSS Spectroscopic plate ID
      MJD - MJD of observations
  FIBERID - Fiber ID of observations
    CLASS - The classification of the object (1=SF, 2=Low S/N SF,
            3=Composite, 4=AGN, -1=Unclassifiable)
       RA - The RA of the object from the latest Photo reductions
      DEC - The DEC of the object
  PLUG_RA - The RA used for the fiber plugmap
 PLUG_DEC - The DEC used for the fiber plugmap
      LGM - The stellar mass estimate (log M*) used for the total SFR/M*
   LGMFIB - The stellar mass estimate used for the fibre SFR/M*

sfr_info.txt.gz. Text file containing some of the above information in ASCII format. The columns are:

 PLATEID - SDSS Spectroscopic plate ID
      MJD - MJD of observations
  FIBERID - Fiber ID of observations
    CLASS - The classification of the object (1=SF, 2=Low S/N SF,
            3=Composite, 4=AGN, -1=Unclassifiable)
  FIB_P16 - The 16% c.f. level of the fibre log SFR likelihood distribution
 FIB_MODE - The model of the same
  FIB_AVG - The average of the same
  FIB_P84 - The 84% c.f. level

Then the same for total log SFR

Then the same order for the log SFR/M* inside the fibre

Then the same order for the log SFR/M* total

Then
      LGM - The stellar mass used for the total SFR/M* estimates 
   FIBLGM - The stellar mass used for the fibre SFR/M* estimates

The fortran format used to print each line in this file is

(I4,1X,I5,1X,I3,1X,I2,2X,16(F9.5,1X),F8.4,1X,F8.4)