A molecular outflow in the Circinus galaxy

Details A molecular outflow in the Circinus galaxy A molecular outflow in the Circinus galaxy

Apr 1999

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999a%26a...344..767c&link_type=abstract

Astronomy and Astrophysics, v.344, p.767-778 (1999)

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

16

Galaxy: Evolution, Galaxies: Active, Galaxies: Individual: Circinus Galaxy, Galaxies: Ism, Galaxies: Kinematics And Dynamics

Scientific paper

From previous work on the Circinus galaxy we postulated that ~50% of the molecular gas in this type 2 Seyfert nucleus is distributed in a sub-kiloparsec circumnuclear ring, probably associated with the ongoing star-burst. In addition to this, we postulated the possible presence of a molecular outflow along the galaxy's minor axis. In this work we use a modified version of the routine used previously \cite{cjrb98}, in order to model this feature. From our results we believe that a 90(deg) wide outflow, which constitutes ~40% of the molecular gas within the central +/-600 pc, extends to a distance of ~+/-500 pc along the rotation axis of the ring with a maximum velocity of ~190 km\ s(-1) . The bulk velocity, which is somewhat lower than this, gives an estimate of ga10 (7) L_sun for the mechanical luminosity of the outflow. Armed with a model of the molecular gas distribution, and the fact that the large scale molecular ring appears to be perpendicular to the outflow/radio jets, we modelled how the CO luminosity varies with ring and outflow inclination i.e. Seyfert type. Our results show that in the case of a ring+outflow system, we expect very little difference in the luminosities of a face-on and an identical edge-on system. In the case of a ring only distribution however, we do expect, due to ``hole'' in the gas, slightly more emission from a sufficiently close edge-on system, but still not enough to account for the differences in CO luminosities which have been observed between type 1 and type 2 Seyferts. This result supports the notion that something more than mere orientation comes into play when explaining these differences, thus having major implications for the unified theories of active galactic nuclei. Based on results collected at the European Southern Observatory, La Silla, Chile

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