GalMass: A Smartphone Application for Estimating Galaxy Masses

Abstract

This note documents the methods used by the smartphone application, "GalMass," which has been released on the Android Market. GalMass estimates the halo virial mass (Mvir), stellar mass (Mstar), gas mass (Mgas), and galaxy gas fraction of a central galaxy as a function of redshift (z<2), with any one of the above masses as an input parameter. In order to convert between Mvir and Mstar (in either direction), GalMass uses fitting functions that approximate the abundance matching models of either Conroy & Wechsler (2009), Moster et al. (2010), or Behroozi et al. (2010). GalMass uses a a semi-empirical fit to observed galaxy gas fractions to convert between Mstar and Mgas, as outlined in Stewart et al. (2009).