UV Star Formation Rates of the SHIELD Dwarf Galaxies

The Survey of H i in Extremely Low-mass Dwarfs (SHIELD) is a multiwavelength observational project targeting gas-rich, star-forming dwarf galaxies at the faint end of the H i mass function. We present near-ultraviolet (NUV) and far-ultraviolet (FUV) flux measurements obtained from GALEX survey images and use these fluxes to derive FUV star formation rates (SFRs) for all 75 SHIELD galaxies with GALEX data. This paper represents the first published analysis that makes use of the full SHIELD sample. We compare the FUV SFRs to a variety of physical quantities to better understand the nature of SHIELD galaxies. When comparing the Hα SFRs to the FUV SFRs for SHIELD and other local galaxy surveys, we confirm and solidify previous results that show that Hα-based SFRs for dwarf galaxies can grossly underestimate the true rate of star formation, emphasizing the highly stochastic nature of star formation in extremely low-mass galaxies. We further show that FUV SFRs appear to be robust tracers of star formation down to the very lowest galaxy masses included in this study. We show that baryonic mass is the best mass-related tracer for the prediction of the FUV SFR of the galaxies in our sample. Not surprisingly, the SHIELD dwarf galaxies exhibit long gas-depletion timescales and large gas mass fractions: fully 68% of the SHIELD galaxies have gas masses that are larger than their stellar masses.