Tracing the chemical footprint of shocks in AGN-host and starburst galaxies with ALMA multi-line molecular studies

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution multi-line molecular observations to compare shock tracers in an AGN-host galaxy and a starburst galaxy, revealing differences in their ISM energetics and shock processes.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of shock tracers in two different galaxy types, enhancing understanding of galactic shocks and ISM chemistry.

Findings

Differences in shock tracer intensities between galaxies.

Insights into the energetics of AGN versus starburst environments.

Enhanced understanding of large-scale shocks in diverse galactic contexts.

Abstract

Multi-line molecular observations are an ideal tool for a systematic study of the physico-chemical processes in the Interstellar Medium (ISM), given the wide range of critical densities associated with different molecules and their transitions, and the dependencies of chemical reactions on the energy budget of the system. Recently high spatial resolution of typical shock tracers - SiO, HNCO, and CH3OH - have been studied in the potentially shocked regions in two nearby galaxies: NGC 1068 (an AGN-host galaxy) (Huang et al., Astron. Astrophys., 2022, 666, A102; Huang et al., in prep.) and NGC 253 (a starburst galaxy) (K.-Y. Huang et al., arXiv, 2023, preprint, arXiv:2303.12685, DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2303.12685). This paper is dedicated to the comparative study of these two distinctively different galaxies, with the aim of determining the differences in their energetics and understanding large-scale shocks in dfferent types of galaxies.