CO Line Emission from Compact Nuclear Starburst Disks Around Active Galactic Nuclei

TL;DR

This paper predicts CO emission features from dense, compact starburst disks around AGN, suggesting these could be identified via specific CO line signatures and used to understand AGN obscuration.

Contribution

It introduces models of nuclear starburst disks around AGN and predicts their CO line emission characteristics, highlighting potential observational signatures.

Findings

Compact starburst disks exhibit higher CO excitation and brightness temperature ratios.

Strong absorption features are predicted for high-J CO lines in these disks.

CO SLEDs can help determine if starburst disks cause AGN obscuration.

Abstract

There is substantial evidence for a connection between star formation in the nuclear region of a galaxy and growth of the central supermassive black hole. Furthermore, starburst activity in the region around an active galactic nucleus (AGN) may provide the obscuration required by the unified model of AGN. Molecular line emission is one of the best observational avenues to detect and characterize dense, star-forming gas in galactic nuclei over a range of redshift. This paper presents predictions for the carbon monoxide (CO) line features from models of nuclear starburst disks around AGN. These small scale ($\la 100$ pc), dense and hot starbursts have CO luminosities similar to scaled-down ultra-luminous infrared galaxies and quasar host galaxies. Nuclear starburst disks that exhibit a pc-scale starburst and could potentially act as the obscuring torus show more efficient CO excitation and higher brightness temperature ratios than those without such a compact starburst. In addition, the compact starburst models predict strong absorption when $J_{\mathrm{Upper}} \ga 10$, a unique observational signature of these objects. These findings allow for the possibility that CO SLEDs could be used to determine if starburst disks are responsible for the obscuration in $z \la 1$ AGN. Directly isolating the nuclear CO line emission of such compact regions around AGN from galactic-scale emission will require high resolution imaging or selecting AGN host galaxies with weak galactic-scale star formation. Stacking individual CO SLEDs will also be useful in detecting the predicted high-$J$ features.