Correlations between Far-IR, HCN, and CO Luminosities of Normal Spiral and Luminous IR Galaxies

Details Correlations between Far-IR, HCN, and CO Luminosities of Normal Spiral and Luminous IR Galaxies Correlations between Far-IR, HCN, and CO Luminosities of Normal Spiral and Luminous IR Galaxies

Dec 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000aas...197.9603g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, 197th AAS Meeting, #96.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 32, p.1570

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

2

Scientific paper

We report the results of a large survey of HCN(1-0) emission from a wide range of more than ~ 60 galaxies (Gao & Solomon 2001a,b). HCN emission, traces dense molecular gas (n(H2 ) > 104 cm-3), typically found in the cores of giant molecular clouds with active high mass star formation while CO emission traces gas at lower densities (n(H2 ) > 200 cm-3). We find that the HCN line luminosity (L HCN) is strongly correlated with the IR luminosity (L IR) of galaxies over 4 orders of magnitude up to and including ultraluminous IR galaxies (ULIRGs) with L IR > 1012 Lsun, which confirms an earlier result based on a much smaller sample (Solomon et al. 1992). The correlation is linear and is substantially stronger than the well known CO--IR correlation which has more scatter and breaks down above 1011 Lsun. After normalizing to CO luminosity (L CO), there is still a strong correlation between L IR/L CO and L HCN/L CO. The results demonstrate that the star formation rate which produces the IR luminosity depends linearly on the mass of dense molecular gas and not on the total molecular gas or the total HI gas mass. ULIRGs are powered by star formation and have the same rate of star formation per solar mass of dense molecular gas as ordinary spiral galaxies.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Correlations between Far-IR, HCN, and CO Luminosities of Normal Spiral and Luminous IR Galaxies does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Correlations between Far-IR, HCN, and CO Luminosities of Normal Spiral and Luminous IR Galaxies, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Correlations between Far-IR, HCN, and CO Luminosities of Normal Spiral and Luminous IR Galaxies will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1727419