ALMA Imaging of the CO(6-5) Line Emission in NGC 7130
Abstract
In this paper, we report our high-resolution (0".20 × 0".14 or ~70 × 49 pc) observations of the CO(6-5) line emission, which probes warm and dense molecular gas, and the 434 μm dust continuum in the nuclear region of NGC 7130, obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). The CO line and dust continuum fluxes detected in our ALMA observations are 1230 ± 74 Jy km s^(−1) and 814 ± 52 mJy, respectively, which account for 100% and 51% of their total fluxes. We find that the CO(6-5) and dust emissions are generally spatially correlated, but their brightest peaks show an offset of ~70 pc, suggesting that the gas and dust emissions may start decoupling at this physical scale. The brightest peak of the CO(6-5) emission does not spatially correspond to the radio continuum peak, which is likely dominated by an active galactic nucleus (AGN). This, together with our additional quantitative analysis, suggests that the heating contribution of the AGN to the CO(6-5) emission in NGC 7130 is negligible. The CO(6-5) and the extinction-corrected Pa-α maps display striking differences, suggestive of either a breakdown of the correlation between warm dense gas and star formation at linear scales of <100 pc or a large uncertainty in our extinction correction to the observed Pa-α image. Over a larger scale of ~2.1 kpc, the double-lobed structure found in the CO(6-5) emission agrees well with the dust lanes in the optical/near-infrared images.
Additional Information
© 2016 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2015 December 6; accepted 2016 February 22; published 2016 March 29. We thank the anonymous referee for useful comments. Y.Z. and Y.G. acknowledge support by NSFC grants No. 11173059, 11390373 and 11420101002, and CAS pilot-b program #XDB09000000. This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: ADS/JAO.ALMA#2013.1.00524.S. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (USA), and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada) and NSC and ASIAA (Taiwan), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO, and NAOJ. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.Attached Files
Published - apj_820_2_118.pdf
Submitted - 1602.07070v2.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 66869
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20160510-100231576
- 11173059
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- 11390373
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- 11420101002
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- XDB09000000
- Chinese Academy of Sciences
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- NSF
- Created
-
2016-05-10Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-11Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)