LOCAL INSTABILITY SIGNATURES IN ALMA OBSERVATIONS OF DENSE GAS IN NGC 7469 Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift, 2015

We present an unprecedented measurement of the disk stability and local instability scales in the luminous infrared Seyfert 1 host, NGC 7469, based on ALMA observations of dense gas tracers and with a synthesized beam of 165 × 132 pc. While we confirm that non-circular motions are not significant in redistributing the dense interstellar gas in this galaxy, we find compelling evidence that the dense gas is a suitable tracer for studying the origin of its intensely high-mass star-forming ringlike structure. Our derived disk stability parameter $\mathcal{Q}$ accounts for a thick disk structure, and its value falls below unity at the radii in which intense star formation is found. Furthermore, we derive the characteristic instability scale ${\lambda }_{c}$ and find a striking agreement between our measured scale of ~180 pc and the typical sizes of individual complexes of young and massive star clusters seen in high-resolution images.

Författare

K. Fathi

Stockholms universitet

Stockholm Observatory

T. Izumi

University of Tokyo

Alessandro Romeo

Chalmers, Rymd- och geovetenskap, Radioastronomi och astrofysik

M. Imanishi

National Institutes of Natural Sciences - National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

E. Hatziminaoglou

European Southern Observatory (ESO)

Susanne Aalto

Chalmers, Rymd- och geovetenskap, Radioastronomi och astrofysik

Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA)

National Institutes of Natural Sciences - National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

K. Kohno

Research Center for the Early Universe

University of Tokyo

D. S. Meier

New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

N. Nakai

Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences

Ehime University

Astrophysical Journal

0004-637X (ISSN) 1538-4357 (eISSN)

Vol. 806 L34 (6pp)- L34

Ämneskategorier

Astronomi, astrofysik och kosmologi

Fundament

Grundläggande vetenskaper

DOI

10.1088/2041-8205/806/2/L34