Hδ-strong galaxies in the sloan digital sky survey:: I.: The catalog

We present here a new and homogeneous sample of 3340 galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) based solely on the observed strength of their Hdelta hydrogen Balmer absorption line. The presence of a strong Hdelta line within the spectrum of a galaxy indicates that the galaxy has undergone a significant change in its star-formation history within the last Gigayear. Therefore, such galaxies have received considerable attention in recent years, because they provide an opportunity to study galaxy evolution in action. These galaxies are commonly known as "post-starburst", "E + A", "k + a", and Hdelta-strong galaxies. Their study has been severely hampered by the lack of a large, statistical sample of such galaxies. In this paper, we rectify this problem by selecting a sample of galaxies which possess an absorption Hdelta equivalent width of EW(Hdelta(max)) - DeltaEW(Hdelta(max)) > 4 Angstrom from 106682 galaxies in the SDSS. The measured abundance of our Hdelta-strong (HDS) galaxies is 2.6+/-0.1% of all galaxies within a volume-limited sample of 0.05 < z < 0.1 and M-r* < -20.5, which is consistent with previous studies of such galaxies described in the literature. We find that only 25 of our HDS galaxies in this volume-limited sample (3.5 +/- 0.7%) show no, or little, evidence for [O-II] and Halpha emission lines, thus indicating that true E + A galaxies (as originally defined by Dressler and Gunn) are extremely rare objects at low redshift, i.e., only 0.09 +/- 0.02% of all galaxies in this volume-limited sample are true E + A galaxies. In contrast, 89 +/- 5% of our HDS galaxies in the volume-limited sample have significant detections of the [O-II] and Halpha emission lines. Of these, only 131 galaxies are robustly classified as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) and, therefore, a majority of these emission-line HDS galaxies are starforming galaxies. We find that 52 +/- 12% (27/52) of the galaxies in our volume-limited HDS sample that possess no detectable [O-II] emission, do however possess detectable Halpha emission lines. These may be dusty star-forming galaxies. We provide the community with this new catalog of Hdelta-strong galaxies to aid in our understanding of these galaxies, via detailed follow-up observations, as well as providing a low-shift sample for comparison with higher redshift studies of HDS galaxies.