NOEMA3D: Spatially resolved dust, CO, and [C I] in massive star-forming main sequence galaxies at cosmic noon
Abstract
We present a spatially resolved study of cold molecular gas and dust in ten main-sequence galaxies at z=1.1-1.6, using observations of CO(4-3), CO(3-2), [C I](1-0), and dust continuum from the NOEMA3D survey. We find a widely presence of spatially extended molecular gas and dust, with sizes comparable to those of the stellar disk, in contrast to those of central-dominated starburst galaxies at similar redshifts. While various molecular gas tracers generally exhibit similar spatial distributions, the CO line (J=3-2 or J=4-3) remain the most effective for mapping molecular gas distribution and kinematics. In addition, the spatially resolved correlations between different molecular gas tracers exhibit about two times larger scatter than their galactic-integrated correlations, indicating that interstellar medium (ISM) conditions already deviate from global averages on scales of 3-6 kpc, likely reflecting the clumpy or inhomogeneous ISM in cosmic noon star-forming galaxies. Within our sample, both the molecular gas fraction and its depletion time are nearly constant across the galactic disks out to 2 Re, supporting a global linear Kennicutt-Schmidt law. The presence of extended molecular gas disks, along with regular stellar structures, small central bulges, and ordered cold gas kinematics, supports the idea that the evolution of main-sequence disk galaxies at cosmic noon is driven by steady gas accretion and transport through prominent spiral arms and/or bars. This process stands in contrast to the merger-driven stochastic gas accretion in compact starbursts.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.18504,
title = {NOEMA3D: Spatially resolved dust, CO, and [C I] in massive star-forming main sequence galaxies at cosmic noon},
author = {Jianhang Chen and Linda J. Tacconi and Reinhard Genzel and Roberto Neri and Karl Schuster and Natascha M. Förster Schreiber and Jean-Baptiste Jolly and Stavros Pastras and Letizia Scaloni and Giulia Tozzi and Capucine Barféty and Alberto Bolatto and Andreas Burker and Françoise Combes and Pierre Cox and Ric Davies and Frank Eisenhauer and Juan Manuel Espejo Salcedo and Rodrigo Herrera-Camu and Santi García-Burillo and Tadayuki Kodama and Lilian Lee and Minju M. Lee and Daizhong Liu and Dieter Lutz and Giovanni Mazzolari and Thorsten Naab and Amit Nestor Shachar and Claudia Pulsoni and Alvio Renzini and Monica Rubio and Taro T. Shimizu and Amiel Sternberg and Eckhard Sturm and Hannah Übler and Antonio Usero and Stijn Wuyts},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.18504},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
16 pages, 12 figures, submitted to A&A, see also a companion paper Jolly et al. 2026, arXiv:2604.18503