H2O emission in high-z ultra-luminous infrared galaxies
Abstract
Using IRAM PdBI we report the detection of H2O in six new lensed ultra-luminous starburst galaxies at high redshift, discovered in the Herschel H-ATLAS survey. The sources are detected either in the 2_{02}-1_{11} or 2_{11}-2_{02} H_2O emission lines with integrated line fluxes ranging from 1.8 to 14 Jy.km/s. The corresponding apparent luminosities are mu x L_H2O ~ 3-12 x 10^8 Lo, where mu is the lensing magnification factor (3 < mu < 12). These results confirm that H2O lines are among the strongest molecular lines in such galaxies, with intensities almost comparable to those of the high-J CO lines, and same profiles and line widths (200-900 km/s) as the latter. With the current sensitivity of PdBI, H2O can therefore easily be detected in high-z lensed galaxies (with F(500um) > 100 mJy) discovered in the Herschel surveys. Correcting the luminosities for lensing amplification, L_H2O is found to have a strong dependence on the IR luminosity, varying as ~L_IR^{1.2}. This relation which needs to be confirmed with better statistics, may indicate a role of radiative (IR) excitation of the H2O lines, and implies that high-z galaxies with L_IR >~ 10^13 Lo tend to be very strong emitters in H2O, that have no equivalent in the local universe.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1301.6618,
title = {H2O emission in high-z ultra-luminous infrared galaxies},
author = {A. Omont and Chentao Yang and P. Cox and R. Neri and A. Beelen and S. Bussmann and R. Gavazzi and P. van der Werf and D. Riechers and D. Downes and M. Krips and S. Dye and R. Ivison and J. D. Vieira and A. Weiss and J. E. Aguirre and M. Baes and A. J. Baker and F. Bertoldi and A. Cooray and H. Dannerbauer and G. De Zotti and S. A. Eales and H. Fu and Y. Gao and M. Guelin and A. I. Harris and M. Jarvis and M. Lehnert and L. Leeuw and R. Lupu and K. Menten and M. J. Michalowski and M. Negrello and S. Serjeant and P. Temi and R. Auld and A. Dariush and L. Dunne and J. Fritz and R. Hopwood and C. Hoyos and E. Ibar and S. Maddox and M. W. L. Smith and E. Valiante and J. Bock and C. M. Bradford and J. Glenn and K. S. Scott},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.6618},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
13 pages, 4 figures A&A in press