English

A Correlation Between CO Linewidth and Starburst Age in Barred Spiral Galaxies

Astrophysics 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

New CO(1-0) and CO(2-1) profiles complemented by data from the literature are used to obtain CO linewidths for 29 barred spiral galaxies with young nuclear starbursts. The ages of the starbursts were estimated from optical spectroscopy and recent evolutionary synthesis models. The CO linewidths and the starburst ages are correlated : galaxies with young (4-6 Myr) starbursts display narrow (< 100 km/s) CO line while those with older starbursts show broader CO lines. We discuss several scenarios of the gas dynamics during the nuclear starbursts' evolution to interpret the correlation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9612173,
  title  = {A Correlation Between CO Linewidth and Starburst Age in Barred Spiral Galaxies},
  author = {T. Contini and H. Wozniak and S. Considere and E. Davoust},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9612173},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in A&A. 4 pages, including one figure. LateX using l-aa and epsf macros