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SFR catalogue

Warning about total SFRs

As of 09/10/05 a problem with the photometry for duplicate objects was discovered and new total SFRs have been posted. Note that even the fiber SFRs for the unclassed galaxies was affected, hence we recommend anyone with older files to update the SFR files.

Summary

This catalogue contains star formation rate estimates for galaxies in the DR4 obtained as described in Brinchmann, J. et al 2004, "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 DR4. 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.

In some cases the aperture corrections do fail. These have not been removed from this catalogue as it may be useful to know about these. 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 dot up dot pt.

Scalings for the aperture corrections

The use of spectrophometric magnitudes should be clarified. Each spectrum is analysed from the FITS file provided by the SDSS and this has an associated magnitude which might differ somewhat from the fiber magnitude provided by the photo pipeline. In general the agreement for the colours is excellent, but there are slight offsets (and a few substantial ones) in the normalisation. This is not a major cause of concern, but throughout we have calculated SFRs relative to the specotrophotometric magnitudes (see this link for details about these). This ensures that the magnitudes we use when scaling to total SFRs are sensible (although the aperture corrections will of course occasionally fail!).

Whenever a magnitude was not possible to measure from the spectrum (gap in the spectrum, outside the spectral coverage etc.) we have replaced these using the photo fiber magnitudes - utilizing the fact that the colours match very well between the (reddening corrected) fiber magnitudes and the spectrophotometric magnitudes. This is also how we calculate appropriate z-band magnitudes to estimate the stellar mass within the fiber.

Files available

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