Diverse Molecular Structures Across The Whole Star-Forming Disk of M83: High fidelity Imaging at 40pc Resolution
Abstract
We present high-fidelity CO(1-0) imaging of molecular gas across the full star-forming disk of M83, using ALMA's 12m, 7m, and TP arrays and the MIRIAD package. The data have a mass sensitivity and resolution of 10^4Msun and 40 pc. The full disk coverage shows that the characteristics of molecular gas change radially from the center to outer disk. The molecular gas distribution shows coherent large-scale structures in the inner part, including the central concentration, bar offset ridges, and prominent molecular spiral arms. In the outer disk, the spiral arms appear less spatially coherent, and even flocculent. Massive filamentary gas concentrations are abundant even in the interarm regions. Building up these structures in the interarm regions would require a very long time (~>100Myr). Instead, they must have formed within stellar spiral arms and been released into the interarm regions. For such structures to survive through the dynamical processes, the lifetimes of these structures and their constituent molecules and molecular clouds must be long (~>100Myr). These interarm structures host little or no star formation traced by Halpha. The new map also shows extended CO emission, which likely represents an ensemble of unresolved molecular clouds.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2303.12108,
title = {Diverse Molecular Structures Across The Whole Star-Forming Disk of M83: High fidelity Imaging at 40pc Resolution},
author = {Jin Koda and Akihiko Hirota and Fumi Egusa and Kazushi Sakamoto and Tsuyoshi Sawada and Mark Heyer and Junichi Baba and Samuel Boissier and Daniela Calzetti and Jennifer Donovan Meyer and Bruce G. Elmegreen and Armando Gil de Paz and Nanase Harada and Luis C. Ho and Masato I. N. Kobayashi and Nario Kuno and Amanda M Lee and Barry F. Madore and Fumiya Maeda and Sergio Martin and Kazuyuki Muraoka and Kouichiro Nakanishi and Sachiko Onodera and Jorge L. Pineda and Nick Scoville and Yoshimasa Watanabe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.12108},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in ApJ