The JCMT Nearby Galaxies Legacy Survey II: Warm Molecular Gas and Star Formation in Three Field Spiral Galaxies

TL;DR

This study maps warm molecular gas in three nearby spiral galaxies, revealing that star formation efficiency remains consistent across different conditions and challenging some existing correlations in galaxy star formation models.

Contribution

It provides large-scale CO J=3-2 emission maps of three galaxies, analyzing their star formation and gas properties with high spatial resolution and multi-wavelength data.

Findings

Gas depletion times are consistent with other spiral galaxies.

Star formation efficiency shows no correlation with gas surface density.

Star formation efficiency may decline with increasing molecular gas density.

Abstract

We present the results of large-area CO J=3-2 emission mapping of three nearby field galaxies, NGC 628, NGC 3521, and NGC 3627, completed at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope as part of the Nearby Galaxies Legacy Survey. These galaxies all have moderate to strong CO J=3-2 detections over large areas of the fields observed by the survey, showing resolved structure and dynamics in their warm/dense molecular gas disks. All three galaxies were part of the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey sample, and as such have excellent published multi-wavelength ancillary data. These data sets allow us to examine the star formation properties, gas content, and dynamics of these galaxies on sub-kiloparsec scales. We find that the global gas depletion times for dense/warm molecular gas in these galaxies is consistent with other results for nearby spiral galaxies, indicating this may be independent of galaxy properties such as structures, gas compositions, and environments. Similar to the results from the THINGS HI survey, we do not see a correlation of the star formation efficiency with the gas surface density consistent with the Schmidt-Kennicutt law. Finally, we find that the star formation efficiency of the dense molecular gas traced by CO J=3-2 is potentially flat or slightly declining as a function of molecular gas density, the CO J=3-2/J=1-0 ratio (in contrast to the correlation found in a previous study into the starburst galaxy M83), and the fraction of total gas in molecular form.