Multi-Transition Study of M51's Molecular Gas Spiral Arms

TL;DR

This study maps and analyzes the molecular gas in M51's spiral arms, revealing that GMCs there are similar to those in the Milky Way, with high extinction but limited current star formation activity.

Contribution

It provides detailed multi-line molecular gas observations and LVG analysis of M51's spiral arms, showing their GMCs resemble Galactic GMCs and assessing star formation activity.

Findings

GMCs in M51's spiral arms are similar to Galactic GMCs in temperature and density.

The H_2 conversion factor is close to the Galactic value.

Most GMCs are not actively forming stars despite high extinction.

Abstract

Two selected regions in the molecular gas spiral arms in M51 were mapped with the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) mm-interferometer in the 12CO(2-1), 13CO(1-0), C18O(1-0), HCN(1-0) and HCO+(1-0) emission lines. The CO data have been combined with the 12CO(1-0) data from Aalto et al. (1999) covering the central 3.5kpc to study the physical properties of the molecular gas. All CO data cubes were short spacing corrected using IRAM 30m (12CO(1-0): NRO 45m) single dish data. A large velocity gradient (LVG) analysis finds that the giant molecular clouds (GMCs) are similar to Galactic GMCs when studied at 180pc (120pc) resolution with an average kinetic temperature of T_kin = 20(16)K and H_2 density of n(H_2) = 120(240)cm^(-3) when assuming virialized clouds (a constant velocity gradient dv/dr. The associated conversion factor between H_2 mass and CO luminosity is close to the Galactic value for most regions analyzed. Our findings suggest that the GMC population in the spiral arms of M51 is similar to those of the Milky Way and therefore the strong star formation occurring in the spiral arms has no strong impact on the molecular gas in the spiral arms. Extinction inferred from the derived H_2 column density is very high (A_V about 15 - 30 mag), about a factor of 5-10 higher than the average value derived toward HII regions. Thus a significant fraction of the ongoing star formation could be hidden inside the dust lanes of the spiral arms. A comparison of MIPS 24um and H_alpha data, however, suggests that this is not the case and most of the GMCs studied here are not (yet) forming stars. We also present low (4.5") resolution OVRO maps of the HCN(1-0) and HCO+(1-0) emission at the location of the brightest 12CO(1-0) peak.