English

Dense gas in local galaxies revealed by multiple tracers

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2021-03-24 v1

Abstract

We present 3 mm and 2 mm band simultaneously spectroscopic observations of HCN 1-0, HCO+^{+} 1-0, HNC 1-0, and CS 3-2 with the IRAM 30 meter telescope, toward a sample of 70 sources as nearby galaxies with infrared luminosities ranging from several 105L^{5}L_{\odot} to more than 1012L^{12}L_{\odot}. After combining HCN 1-0, HCO+^{+} 1-0 and HNC 1-0 data from literature with our detections, relations between luminosities of dense gas tracers (HCN 1-0, HCO+^{+} 1-0 and HNC 1-0) and infrared luminosities are derived, with tight linear correlations for all tracers. Luminosities of CS 3-2 with only our observations also show tight linear correlation with infrared luminosities. No systematic difference is found for tracing dense molecular gas among these tracers. Star formation efficiencies for dense gas with different tracers also do not show any trend along different infrared luminosities. Our study also shows that HCN/HCO+^{+} line ratio might not be a good indicator to diagnose obscured AGN in galaxies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.04126,
  title  = {Dense gas in local galaxies revealed by multiple tracers},
  author = {Fei Li and Junzhi Wang and Feng Gao and Shu Liu and Zhi-Yu Zhang and Shanghuo Li and Yan Gong and Juan Li and Yong Shi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.04126},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

25 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:50:06.051Z