H-alpha Star Formation Rates of the SHIELD Dwarf Galaxies
The Survey of HI in Extremely Low-mass Dwarfs (SHIELD) galaxy sample is an HI-selected catalog of galaxies that occupy the extreme low-mass end of the HI mass function. Our team is carrying out a comprehensive multi-wavelength observational program targeting these gas-rich, star-forming dwarf galaxies. The current paper presents H-alpha narrowband observations of the full SHIELD sample. We detect 55 of the 82 galaxies (67%) with nebular H-alpha emission, and infer sensitive upper limits to the H-alpha fluxes for the 27 non-detections. We derive H-alpha luminosities and star formation rates (SFRs), or upper limits, for all 82 SHIELD galaxies. We also present, for the first time, deep broadband and continuum-subtracted H-alpha images plus a summary of the properties for the entire sample. Our analysis of the H-alpha data re-affirms previous results which show that at low levels of star formation (log(SFR_{H-alpha}) < -2.5), H-alpha becomes an increasingly poor tracer of the recent average SFR as measured by far-UV (FUV) luminosities. However, we show that this effect is not strictly correlated with the mass of the galaxy. Some very low-mass SHIELD galaxies with higher H-alpha-based SFRs show good agreement with SFR_{FUV}. The SHIELD galaxies show no correlation between H-alpha SFR and gas mass fraction, but reveal a modest correlation between H-alpha specific SFR and gas mass fraction. Overall, the star formation efficiency exhibited by the SHIELD dwarfs is rather low, despite the gas-rich nature of the sample (68% have M_{gas} > M_{stellar}).