The kinematics of massive high-redshift dusty star-forming galaxies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new visibility-space modeling method for galaxy kinematics using ALMA data, revealing insights into the mass, dynamics, and evolution of massive high-redshift dusty star-forming galaxies.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel visibility-space kinematic modeling technique and applies it to high-redshift galaxies, providing new constraints on their properties and evolutionary links.

Findings

Derived a CO-to-H2 conversion factor of 0.92 ± 0.36.

Found these galaxies follow a similar Tully-Fisher relation as other high-redshift star-forming galaxies.

Supported an evolutionary connection between high-redshift dusty galaxies and local early-type galaxies.

Abstract

We present a new method for modelling the kinematics of galaxies from interferometric observations by performing the optimization of the kinematic model parameters directly in visibility-space instead of the conventional approach of fitting velocity fields produced with the CLEAN algorithm in real-space. We demonstrate our method on ALMA observations of $^{12}$CO (2$-$1), (3$-$2) or (4$-$3) emission lines from an initial sample of 30 massive 850$\mu$m-selected dusty star-forming galaxies with far-infrared luminosities $\gtrsim$$\,10^{12}\,$L$_{\odot}$ in the redshift range $z \sim\,$1.2$-$4.7. Using the results from our modelling analysis for the 12 sources with the highest signal-to-noise emission lines and disk-like kinematics, we conclude the following: (i) Our sample prefers a CO-to-$H_2$ conversion factor, of $\alpha_{\rm CO} = 0.92 \pm 0.36$; (ii) These far-infrared luminous galaxies follow a similar Tully$-$Fisher relation between the circularized velocity, $V_{\rm circ}$, and baryonic mass, $M_{\rm b}$, as more typical star-forming samples at high redshift, but extend this relation to much higher masses $-$ showing that these are some of the most massive disk-like galaxies in the Universe; (iii) Finally, we demonstrate support for an evolutionary link between massive high-redshift dusty star-forming galaxies and the formation of local early-type galaxies using the both the distributions of the baryonic and kinematic masses of these two populations on the $M_{\rm b}\,-\,\sigma$ plane and their relative space densities.