A new catalogue of ISM content of normal galaxies

Abstract

We have compiled a catalogue of the gas content for a sample of 1916 galaxies, considered to be a fair representation of "normality". The definition of a "normal" galaxy adopted in this work implies that we have purposely excluded from the catalogue galaxies having distorted morphology (such as interaction bridges, tails or lopsidedness) and/or any signature of peculiar kinematics (such as polar rings, counterrotating disks or other decoupled components). In contrast, we have included systems hosting active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the catalogue. This catalogue revises previous compendia on the ISM content of galaxies published by Bregman et al. (1992) and Casoli et al. (1998), and compiles data available in the literature from several small samples of galaxies. Masses for warm dust, atomic and molecular gas, as well as X-ray luminosities have been converted to a uniform distance scale taken from the Catalogue of Principal Galaxies (PGC). We have used two different normalization factors to explore the variation of the gas content along the Hubble sequence: the blue luminosity (LB) and the square of linear diameter (D252). Our catalogue significantly improves the statistics of previous reference catalogues and can be used in future studies to define a template ISM content for "normal" galaxies along the Hubble sequence. The catalogue can be accessed on-line and is also available at the Centre des Données Stellaires (CDS).