A study in blue: The baryon content of isolated low-mass galaxies

We study the baryon content of low-mass galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS DR8), focusing on galaxies in isolated environments where the complicating physics of galaxy–galaxy interactions are minimized. We measure neutral hydrogen (HI) gas masses and line widths for 148 isolated galaxies with stellar mass between 10⁷ and ${10}^{9.5}{M}_{\odot }$. We compare isolated low-mass galaxies to more massive galaxies and galaxies in denser environments by remeasuring HI emission lines from the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA survey 40% data release. All isolated low-mass galaxies either have large atomic gas fractions or large atomic gas fractions cannot be ruled out via their upper limits. We measure a median atomic gas fraction of $f_{gas}=0.81\pm 0.13$ for our isolated low-mass sample with no systems below 0.30. At all stellar masses, the correlations between galaxy radius, baryonic mass, and velocity width are not significantly affected by environment. Finally, we estimate a median baryon to total dynamical mass fraction of $f_{baryon,disk}=0.15\pm 0.17$. We also estimate two different median baryon to halo mass fractions using the results of semi-analytic models $(f_{baryon,halo}=0.04\pm 0.06)$ and abundance matching $(f_{baryon,halo}=0.04\pm 0.02)$. Baryon fractions estimated directly using HI observations appear independent of environment and maximum circular velocity, while baryon fractions estimated using abundance matching show a significant depletion of baryons at low maximum circular velocities.