MHONGOOSE -- A MeerKAT Nearby Galaxy HI Survey

Abstract

The MHONGOOSE (MeerKAT HI Observations of Nearby Galactic Objects: Observing Southern Emitters) survey maps the distribution and kinematics of the neutral atomic hydrogen (HI) gas in and around 30 nearby star-forming spiral and dwarf galaxies to extremely low HI column densities. The HI column density sensitivity (3 sigma over 16 km/s) ranges from ~ 5 x 10^{17} cm^{-2} at 90'' resolution to ~4 x 10^{19} cm^{-2} at the highest resolution of 7''. The HI mass sensitivity (3 sigma over 50 km/s) is ~5.5 X 10^5 M_sun at a distance of 10 Mpc (the median distance of the sample galaxies). The velocity resolution of the data is 1.4 km/s. One of the main science goals of the survey is the detection of cold, accreting gas in the outskirts of the sample galaxies. The sample was selected to cover a range in HI masses, from 10^7 M_sun to almost 10^{11} M_sun, to optimally sample possible accretion scenarios and environments. The distance to the sample galaxies ranges from 3 to 23 Mpc. In this paper, we present the sample selection, survey design, and observation and reduction procedures. We compare the integrated HI fluxes based on the MeerKAT data with those derived from single-dish measurement and find good agreement, indicating that our MeerKAT observations are recovering all flux. We present HI moment maps of the entire sample based on the first ten percent of the survey data, and find that a comparison of the zeroth- and second-moment values shows a clear separation between the physical properties of the HI in areas with star formation and areas without, related to the formation of a cold neutral medium. Finally, we give an overview of the HI-detected companion and satellite galaxies in the 30 fields, five of which have not previously been catalogued. We find a clear relation between the number of companion galaxies and the mass of the main target galaxy.

Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics

References in corpus (31)

• The Circumgalactic Medium
• WSClean: an implementation of a fast, generic wide-field imager for radio astronomy
• Cold gas accretion in galaxies
• The Atomic to Molecular Transition in Galaxies. II: HI and H_2 Column Densities
• The cold gaseous halo of NGC 891
• A z=0 Multi-wavelength Galaxy Synthesis I: A WISE and GALEX Atlas of Local Galaxies
• SoFiA: a flexible source finder for 3D spectral line data
• Galaxy Groups within 3500 km s${}^{-1}$
• HI-to-H2 Transitions and H I Column Densities in Galaxy Star-Forming Regions
• Distances to PHANGS Galaxies: New Tip of the Red Giant Branch Measurements and Adopted Distances
• The Dearth of Neutral Hydrogen in Galactic Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies
• SoFiA 2 -- An automated, parallel HI source finding pipeline for the WALLABY survey
• The 1.28 GHz MeerKAT DEEP2 Image
• Physical Properties of Molecular Clouds at 2 parsec Resolution in the Low-Metallicity Dwarf Galaxy NGC 6822 and the Milky Way
• The Arecibo Galaxy Environment Survey: Precursor Observations of the NGC 628 group
• The AMIGA sample of isolated galaxies III. IRAS data and infrared diagnostics
• The Circumgalactic Medium of Milky Way-like Galaxies in the TNG50 Simulation -- I: Halo Gas Properties and the Role of SMBH Feedback
• Gas accretion from minor mergers in local spiral galaxies
• WALLABY Early Science - III. An HI Study of the Spiral Galaxy NGC 1566
• AGN feeding and feedback in Fornax A: kinematical analysis of the multi-phase ISM
• The AMIGA sample of isolated galaxies XIII. The HI content of an almost "nurture free" sample
• The AMIGA sample of isolated galaxies. XI. Optical characterisation of nuclear activity
• A low HI column density filament in NGC 2403: signature of interaction or accretion
• Neutral hydrogen and magnetic fields in M83 observed with the SKA Pathfinder KAT-7
• A Census of the Extended Neutral Hydrogen Around 18 MHONGOOSE Galaxies
• HALOGAS: Strong Constraints on the Neutral Gas Reservoir and Accretion Rate in Nearby Spiral Galaxies
• FAST discovery of long tidal tails in NGC 4490/85
• Possible origins of anomalous HI gas around MHONGOOSE galaxy, NGC 5068
• MHONGOOSE discovery of a gas-rich low-surface brightness galaxy in the Dorado Group
• Census of Gaseous Satellites around Local Spiral Galaxies
• Extended neutral hydrogen filamentary network in NGC 2403

Cited by in corpus (18)

• PHANGS-MeerKAT and MHONGOOSE HI observations of nearby spiral galaxies: physical drivers of the molecular gas fraction, $R_{\mathrm{mol}}$
• The ALMA-CRISTAL survey: Resolved kinematic studies of main sequence star-forming galaxies at 4<z<6
• Possible origins of anomalous HI gas around MHONGOOSE galaxy, NGC 5068
• MHONGOOSE discovery of a gas-rich low-surface brightness galaxy in the Dorado Group
• New constraints on the evolution of the MHI-M* scaling relation combining CHILES and MIGHTEE-HI data
• The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array Local Group L-band Survey (LGLBS)
• HI within and around observed and simulated galaxy discs -- Comparing MeerKAT observations with mock data from TNG50 and FIRE-2
• Searching for HI around MHONGOOSE Galaxies via Spectral Stacking
• Dense gas scaling relations at kiloparsec scales across nearby galaxies with the ALMA ALMOND and IRAM 30m EMPIRE surveys
• Neutral atomic and molecular gas dynamics in the nearby spiral galaxies NGC 1512, NGC 4535, and NGC 7496
• Predictions for Detecting a Turndown in the Baryonic Tully Fisher Relation
• The ALMA-CRISTAL Survey: Complex kinematics of the galaxies at the end of the Reionization Era
• Uncovering Extraplanar Gas in UGCA 250 with the Ultra-deep MHONGOOSE Survey
• A MeerKAT study of a neutral hydrogen rich grouping of galaxies with megaparsec-scale filamentary-like structure
• Hot accretion onto spiral galaxies: the origin of extended and warped HI discs
• No evidence for Keplerian taper of far-out galactic rotation
• FEASTS and MHONGOOSE: HI Column Density Distribution at $z=0$ for $N_{\mathrm{HI}}>10^{17.8}{\mathrm{cm}}^{-2}$
• Recent Developments on the HI Gas of Low-Redshift Galaxies Seen by the 21cm Emission Lines