xGASS: passive disks do not host unexpectedly large reservoirs of cold atomic hydrogen

Abstract

We use the extended GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey (xGASS) to quantify the relationship between atomic hydrogen (HI) reservoir and current star formation rate (SFR) for central disk galaxies. This is primarily motivated by recent claims for the existence, in this sample, of a large population of passive disks harbouring HI reservoirs as large as those observed in main sequence galaxies. Across the stellar mass range 10\(^{9}<\)M\(_{*}\)/M\(_{\odot}<\)10\(^{11}\), we practically find no passive (\(\gtrsim\)2\(\sigma\) below the star-forming main sequence) disk galaxies with HI reservoirs comparable to those typical of star-forming systems. Even including HI non detections at their upper limits, passive disks typically have \(\geq\)0.5 dex less HI than their active counterparts. We show that previous claims are due to the use of aperture-corrected SFR estimates from the MPA/JHU SDSS DR7 catalog, which do not provide a fair representation of the global SFR of HI-rich galaxies with extended star-forming disks. Our findings confirm that the bulk of the passive disk population in the local Universe is HI-poor. These also imply that the reduction of star formation, even in central disk galaxies, has to be accompanied by a reduction in their HI reservoir.