ALFALFA HI Data Stacking III. Comparison of environmental trends in HI
  gas mass fraction and specific star formation rate
  It is well known that both the star formation rate and the cold gas content
of a galaxy depend on the local density out to distances of a few Megaparsecs.
In this paper, we compare the environmental density dependence of the atomic
gas mass fractions of nearby galaxies with the density dependence of their
central and global specific star formation rates. We stack HI line spectra
extracted from the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA survey centered on galaxies with UV
imaging from GALEX and optical imaging/spectroscopy from SDSS. We use these
stacked spectra to evaluate the mean atomic gas mass fraction of galaxies in
bins of stellar mass and local density. For galaxies with stellar masses less
than 10^10.5 M_sun, the decline in mean atomic gas mass fraction with density
is stronger than the decline in mean global and central specific star formation
rate. The same conclusion does not hold for more massive galaxies. We interpret
our results as evidence for ram-pressure stripping of atomic gas from the outer
disks of low mass satellite galaxies. We compare our results with the
semi-analytic recipes of Guo et al. (2011) implemented on the Millennium II
simulation. These models assume that only the diffuse gas surrounding satellite
galaxies is stripped, a process that is often termed "strangulation". We show
that these models predict relative trends in atomic gas and star formation that
are in disagreement with observations. We use mock catalogues generated from
the simulation to predict the halo masses of the HI-deficient galaxies in our
sample. We conclude that ram-pressure stripping is likely to become effective
in dark matter halos with masses greater than 10^13 M_sun.
