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Systematic search for extremely metal poor galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We carry out a systematic search for extremely metal poor (XMP) galaxies in the spectroscopic sample of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data release 7 (DR7). The XMP candidates are found by classifying all the galaxies according to the form of their spectra in a region 80AA wide around Halpha. Due to the data size, the method requires an automatic classification algorithm. We use k-means. Our systematic search renders 32 galaxies having negligible [NII] lines, as expected in XMP galaxy spectra. Twenty one of them have been previously identified as XMP galaxies in the literature -- the remaining eleven are new. This was established after a thorough bibliographic search that yielded only some 130 galaxies known to have an oxygen metallicity ten times smaller than the Sun (explicitly, with 12+log(O/H) <= 7.65). XMP galaxies are rare; they represent 0.01% of the galaxies with emission lines in SDSS/DR7. Although the final metallicity estimate of all candidates remains pending, strong-line empirical calibrations indicate a metallicity about one-tenth solar, with the oxygen metallicity of the twenty one known targets being 12+log(O/H)= 7.61 +- 0.19. Since the SDSS catalog is limited in apparent magnitude, we have been able to estimate the volume number density of XMP galaxies in the local universe, which turns out to be (1.32 +- 0.23) x 10^-4 Mpc^-3. The XMP galaxies constitute 0.1% of the galaxies in the local volume, or some 0.2% considering only emission line galaxies. All but four of our candidates are blue compact dwarf galaxies (BCDs), and 24 of them have either cometary shape or are formed by chained knots.