Blue diffuse dwarf galaxies

The most promising candidates are extremely metal-poor galaxies (XMPs), i.e. galaxies with <1/10 solar metallicity. However, due to the bright emission-line-based search criteria traditionally used to find XMPs, we may not be sampling the full XMP population.

In 2014, we reoriented this search using only morphological properties and uncovered a population of ~150 'blue diffuse dwarf (BDD) galaxies', and published a sub-sample of 12 BDD spectra. Here, we present optical spectroscopic observations of a larger sample of 51 BDDs, along with their Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) photometric properties. With our improved statistics, we use direct-method abundances to confirm that BDDs are chemically unevolved (7.43<12+log(O/H)<8.01), with ~20 per cent of our sample classified as being XMP galaxies, and find that they are actively forming stars at rates of ~1-33x10^-2^M_{sun}_/yr in HII regions randomly embedded in a blue, low-surface-brightness continuum.