Gas depletion timescale, τ_gas, in dependence of the gas mass assuming the gwIMF in the invariant canonical IMF (left panel) and IGIMF-2021 (right panel) for galaxies located in the LV. The dashed red line shows the age of the Universe, τ_gas = τ_h = 13.8 Gyr, assuming the standard ΛCDM cosmology (Planck Collaboration XIII 2016). The error on the IGIMF-corrected τ_gas values (right panel) is estimated by adopting the SFR values for [Z] = −2.20 (upper limit) and [Z] = 0.45 (lower limit; Sect. 4.2). The solid red lines are fits of the data with Eq. (20). The green dotted line is the ‘minimum-1’ model of Pflamm-Altenburg & Kroupa (2009, their Fig. 7). Note the smaller scatter of the data in the right panel (see also Fig. 9).