Deeply Buried Nuclei in the Infrared-luminous Galaxies NGC 4418 and Arp 220. II. Line Forests at lambda=1.4-0.4 mm and Circumnuclear Gas Observed with ALMA

Journal article, 2021

We present the line observations in our Atacama Millimeter-Submillimeter Array imaging spectral scan toward three deeply buried nuclei in NGC 4418 and Arp 220. We cover 67 GHz in f (rest) = 215-697 GHz at about 0.'' 2 (30, 80 pc) resolution. All the nuclei show dense line forests; we report our initial line identification using 55 species. The line velocities generally indicate gas rotation around each nucleus, tracing nuclear disks of similar to 100 pc in size. We confirmed the counter-rotation of the nuclear disks in Arp 220 and that of the nuclear disk and the galactic disk in NGC 4418. While the brightest lines exceed 100 K, most of the major lines and many C-13 isotopologues show absorption against even brighter continuum cores of the nuclei. The lines with higher upper-level energies, including those from vibrationally excited molecules, tend to arise from smaller areas, indicating radially varying conditions in these nuclei. The outflows from the two Arp 220 nuclei cause blueshifted line absorption below the continuum level. The absorption mostly has small spatial offsets from the continuum peaks to indicate the outflow orientations. The bipolar outflow from the western nucleus is also imaged in multiple emission lines, showing the extent of similar to 1 '' (400 pc). Redshifted line absorption against the nucleus of NGC 4418 indicates either an inward gas motion or a small collimated outflow slanted to the nuclear disk. We also resolved some previous confusions due to line blending and misidentification.