Abstract. For the last 25 years, the 21 cm line has been used productively to investigate the large-scale structure of the Universe, its peculiar velocity field and the measurement of cosmic parameters. In February 2005 a blind HI survey that will cover 7074 square degrees of the high latitude sky was started at Arecibo, using the 7-beam feed L-band feed array (ALFA). Known as the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) Survey, the program is producing a census of HI-bearing objects over a cosmologically significant volume of the local Universe. With respect to previous blind HI surveys, ALFALFA offers an improvement of about one order of magnitude in sensitivity, 4 times the angular resolution, 3 times the spectral resolution, and 1.6 times the total bandwidth of HIPASS. ALFALFA can detect 7 × 10 4 D 2 M of HI, where D is the source distance in Mpc. As of mid 2007, 44% of the survey observations and 15% of the source extraction are completed. We discuss the status of the survey and present a few preliminary results, in particular with reference to the proposed "dark galaxy" VirgoHI21.Keywords. galaxies: distances and redshifts, galaxies: dwarf, galaxies: evolution, galaxies: formation, galaxies: mass function, galaxies: spiral, cosmology: cosmological parameters, cosmology: observations, cosmology: large-scale structure of universe, radio lines: galaxies
What is ALFALFA?Comprehensive wide angle surveys of the extragalactic HI sky became possible with the advent of multifeed front-end systems at L-band. The first such system with spectroscopic capability was installed on the 64 m Parkes telescope in Australia, and has produced the excellent results of the HIPASS survey (Barnes et al. 2001). The 1990s upgrade of the Arecibo telescope, which replaced its line feeds with a Gregorian subreflector system, made it possible for that telescope to host feed arrays, as proposed by Kildal et al. (1993). Eventually a 7-beam radio "camera", named ALFA (Arecibo Lband Feed Array), became operational at Arecibo, enabling large-scale mapping projects with the great sensitivity of the 305-m telescope. A diverse set of mapping projects are now underway at that observatory, ranging from extragalactic HI line, to Galactic line and continuum, to pulsar searches. ALFALFA, the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey, aims to map the peri-and extragalactic HI emission over 7074 deg 2 of the high galactic latitude sky. This will require a total of 4130 hours of telescope time. Exploiting the large collecting area of the Arecibo antenna and its relatively small beam size (∼3.5 ), ALFALFA will be eight times more sensitive than HIPASS with ∼four times better angular resolution. The combination of sensitivity and angular resolution allows dramatically improved ability in determining the position of HI sources, a detail of paramount importance in the identification of source counterparts at other wavelengths. Furthermore, its spectral backend provides 3 times better spectral resolution (5.3 km s −1 at z = 0) and over 1.4 times more bandwidth. These advan...