ALMA Observations of the Antennae Galaxies: I. A New Window on a Prototypical Merger
Bradley C. Whitmore (1), Crystal Brogan (2), Rupali Chandar (3), Aaron, Evans (2,4), John Hibbard (2), Kelsey Johnson (4,5), Adam Leroy (2), George, Privon (4), Anthony Remijan (2), and Kartik Sheth (2) (1-Space Telescope, Science Institute

TL;DR
This paper presents high-resolution ALMA CO (3-2) observations of the Antennae galaxies' overlap region, revealing a filament of gas with knots of low velocity dispersion, and develops an evolutionary classification for star cluster formation.
Contribution
It introduces a detailed observational analysis of molecular gas structures and proposes a new evolutionary framework for star cluster development in merging galaxies.
Findings
Discovery of a 3 kpc filament of CO gas with low internal velocity dispersion.
Estimation of star cluster formation timescale as approximately 10 million years.
Identification of different stages in star cluster evolution based on multi-wavelength data.
Abstract
We present the highest spatial resolution (~0.5") CO (3-2) observations to date of the "overlap" region in the merging Antennae galaxies (NGC 4038/39), taken with the ALMA. We report on the discovery of a long (3 kpc), thin (aspect ratio 30/1), filament of CO gas which breaks up into roughly ten individual knots. Each individual knot has a low internal velocity dispersion (~10 km/s), and the dispersion of the ensemble of knots in the filament is also low (~10 km/s). At the other extreme, we find that the individual clouds in the Super Giant Molecular Cloud 2 region discussed by Wilson and collaborators have a large range of internal velocity dispersions (10 to 80 km/s), and a large dispersion amongst the ensemble (~80 km/s). We use a combination of optical and near-IR data from HST, radio continuum observations taken with the VLA, and CO data from ALMA to develop an evolutionary…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
