Gas, Stars and Baryons in Low Surface Brightness Galaxies
Authors: Karen O'Neil
Published:Stars, Gas, & Dust in Galaxies: Exploring the Links
eds. , (ASP:San Fransisco) (2000)
ABSTRACT:
Recent surveys have discovered hundreds of low surface brightness galaxies
in the local (z < 0.1) Universe. Plots of the surface brightness distribution
(the space density of galaxies plotted against central surface brightness)
show a flat distribution from the bright-end cutoff of 21.65 through the current
observational limit of 25.0 B mag arcsec-2. As no
trend is seen to indicate the
size or mass of galaxies decreases with decreasing central surface brightness,
it is likely that a significant percentage of the baryon content in the universe
is contained in these diffuse systems. In this paper I briefly review the
known properties of low surface brightness galaxies, and describe some current theories
on the baryonic mass fraction of low surface brightness systems and their consequences.
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