Adapting A Generalist, Automated ALFALFA Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation for use with Green Bank Telescope Observational Data

The Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation (BTFR, McGaugh et al. 2000) describes a proportional relationship between the total mass of a galaxy and its rotational velocity. Since 2021, the Undergraduate ALFALFA Team (UAT) has worked to derive a minimal scatter BTFR from neutral hydrogen (HI) observations of galaxies with known distances using automated determinations of redshift, rotational velocity, and HI mass. Our observing project, GBT 22A-430, is providing spectra from 220 galaxies hosting supernovae widely distributed across the sky. Another group associated with the UAT has developed a Python-based method of constructing the BTFR to improve our understanding of galaxies in the ALFALFA survey (Haynes et al. 2018) presented in Ball et al. 2023. A proper BTFR provides refined estimations of parameters such as mass, rotational velocity, and, indirectly, galaxy distance. This work has the additional potential to be adapted for use with other HI-rich galaxy samples in the local universe e.g., the Arecibo Pisces-Perseus Supercluster Survey (APPSS, O'Donoghue et al. 2019). We aim to adapt Ball et al. 2023’s analysis methodology for use with the GBT 22A-430 sample, utilizing GBTIDL, a Green Bank proprietary IDL-based data reduction software, and UAT-developed, pyAPPSS, a Python-based data reduction script for use with APPSS galaxies. We investigate the resultant BTFR and its implications regarding sample galaxies’ characteristics.