The properties of a large volume-limited sample of face-on low surface brightness disk galaxies

TL;DR

This study analyzes a large, volume-limited sample of face-on low surface brightness galaxies, revealing their distinct properties such as lower metallicities, dust, and star formation rates compared to high surface brightness galaxies, indicating different star formation histories.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive statistical comparison of LSBGs and HSBGs using a complete, volume-limited sample, highlighting key differences in their physical and star formation properties.

Findings

LSBGs have lower metallicities and dust attenuation than HSBGs.

LSBGs exhibit higher gas fractions and lower star formation rates.

Star formation activity decreases with decreasing surface brightness.

Abstract

We select a large volume-limited sample of low surface brightness galaxies (LSBGs, 2,021) to investigate their statistical properties and their differences from high surface brightness galaxies (HSBGs, 3,639) in details. The distributions of stellar masses of LSBGs and HSBGs are nearly the same and they have the same median values. Thus this volume-limited sample have good completeness and further remove the effect of stellar masses on their other properties when we compare LSBGs and HSBGs. We found that LSBGs tend to have lower stellar metallicities, and lower effect dust attenuations indicating that they have lower dust, than HSBGs. The LSBGs have relatively higher stellar mass-to-light ratios, higher gas fraction, lower star forming rates (SFRs), and lower specific SFRs than HSBGs. Moreover, with the decreasing surface brightness, gas fraction increase, while the SFRs and specific SFRs decrease rapidly for the sample galaxies. This could mean that the star formation histories between LSBGs and HSBGs are different, HSBGs may have stronger star forming activities than LSBGs.