Beneath the Baselines: Detecting Molecular Emission from Submillimeter Galaxies with the GBT

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

We report the first detection of a submillimeter galaxy (SMG) in CO(1→0) emission using the GBT. We identify a line with Δ vFWHM ˜ 1000 km s-1 in the 1 cm spectrum of SMM~J13120+4242 at z=3.408, which is significantly greater than the width of the previously detected CO(4→3) line. If the observed CO(1→0) line profile arises from a single object and not several merging objects, the CO(4→3)/CO(1→0) brightness temperature ratio of ˜ 0.26 suggests n(H2) > 103 cm-3 and the presence of sub-thermally excited gas. The 10σ integrated line flux implies a cold molecular gas mass M(H2) ˜ 1011 Msun, comparable to the dynamical mass estimate and four times larger than the H2 mass found from the CO(4→3) line. While our observations confirm that this SMG is massive and highly gas-rich, they also suggest that Jupper>3 transitions of CO may not accurately trace cold, diffuse molecular gas in SMGs.

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