HI LINEWIDTHS, ROTATION VELOCITIES AND THE TULLY-FISHER RELATION

We determine the rotation velocities of 108 spiral and irregular galaxies (XV-Sample) from first-order rotation curves from position-velocity maps, based on short 21-cm observations with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT). To test the usual random motion corrections, we compare the global HI linewidths and the rotation velocities, obtained from kinematical fits to two-dimensional velocity fields for a sample of 28 galaxies (RC-Sample), and find that the most frequently used correction formulae (Tully & Fouque 1985) are not very satisfactory. The rotation velocity parameter (the random-motion corrected HI linewidth: W?), derived with these corrections, may be statistically equal to two times the true rotation velocity, but in individual cases the differences can be large. We analyse, for both RC- and XV-Samples, the dependence of the slope of, and scatter in the Tully-Fisher relation on the definition of the rotation velocity parameters- For the RC-Sample, we find that the scatter in the Tully-Fisher relation can be reduced considerably when the rotation velocities derived from rotation curves are used instead of the random-motion corrected global H I linewidths. No such reduction in the scatter is seen for XV-Sample. We conclude that the reduction of the scatter in the Tully-Fisher relation seems to be related to the use of two-dimensional velocity information: accurate rotation velocity and kinematical inclination.