We present the analysis of ≈100 molecular maps of the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko that were obtained with the MIRO submillimeter radiotelescope on board the Rosetta spacecraft. From the ...spectral line mapping of H 216 $_2^{16}$ 216 O, H 218 $_2^{18}$218 O, H 217 $_2^{17}$217 O, CH3OH, NH3, and CO and some fixed nadir pointings, we retrieved the outgassing pattern and total production rates for these species. The analysis covers the period from July 2014, inbound to perihelion, to June 2016, outbound, and heliocentric distances rh = 1.24–3.65 AU. A steep evolution of the outgassing rates with heliocentric distance is observed, typically in rh−16 $r_{\textrm{h}}^{-6}$rh−6 , with significant differences between molecules (e.g. steeper variation for H2O post-perihelion than for methanol). As a consequence, the abundances relative to water in the coma vary. The CH3OH and CO abundances increase after perihelion, while the NH3 abundance peaks around perihelion and then decreases. Outgassing patterns have been modeled as 2D Gaussian jets. The width of these jets is maximum around the equinoxes when the bulk of the outgassing is located near the equator. From July 2014 to February 2015, the outgassing is mostly restricted to a narrower jet (full width at half-maximum ≈80°) originating from high northern latitudes, while around perihelion, most of the gaseous production comes from the southernmost regions ( − 80 ± 5° cometocentric latitude) and forms a 100°–130° (full width at half-maximum) wide fan. We find a peak production of water of 0.8 × 1028 molec. s−1, 2.5 times lower than measured by the ROSINA experiment, and place an upper limit to a 50% additional production that could come from the sublimation of icy grains. We estimate the total loss of ices during this perihelion passage to be 4.18 ± 0.18 × 109 kg. We derive a dust-to-gas ratio in the lost material of 0.7–2.3 (including all sources of errors) based on the nucleus mass loss of 10.5 ± 3.4 × 109 kg estimated by the RSI experiment. We also obtain an estimate of the H 218 $_2^{18}$218 O/H 217 $_2^{17}$217 O ratio of 5.6 ± 0.8.
We present 8.5 arcsec resolution 1.1-mm continuum imaging and CO spectroscopic redshift measurements of eight extremely bright submillimetre galaxies identified from the Planck and Herschel surveys, ...taken with the Large Millimeter Telescope's AzTEC and Redshift Search Receiver instruments. We compiled a candidate list of high-redshift galaxies by cross-correlating the Planck Surveyor mission's highest frequency channel (857 GHz, full width at half-maximum = 4.5 arcmin) with the archival Herschel Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver imaging data, and requiring the presence of a unique, single Herschel counterpart within the 150-arcsec search radius of the Planck source positions with 350-μm flux density larger than 100 mJy, excluding known blazars and foreground galaxies. All eight candidate objects observed are detected in 1.1 mm continuum by AzTEC bolometer camera, and at least one CO line is detected in all cases with a spectroscopic redshift between 1.3 < z
CO < 3.3. Their infrared (IR) spectral energy distributions (SEDs) mapped using the Herschel and AzTEC photometry are consistent with cold dust emission with characteristic temperature between T
d = 43 and 84 K. With apparent IR luminosity of up to L
IR = 3 × 1014μ−1 L⊙, they are some of the most luminous galaxies ever found (with yet unknown gravitational magnification factor μ). The analysis of their SEDs suggests that star formation is powering the bulk of their extremely large IR luminosities. Derived molecular gas masses of
$M_{\rm {H_2}}=(0.6{\rm -}7.8)\times 10^{11} \,\mathrm{M}_{\odot }$
(for μ ≈ 10) also make them some of the most gas-rich high-redshift galaxies ever detected.
The Microwave Instrument on the Rosetta Orbiter (MIRO) has been observing the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko almost continuously since June 2014 at wavelengths near 0.53 mm. We present here ...a map of the water column density in the inner coma (within 3 km from nucleus center) when the comet was at 3.4 AU from the Sun. Based on the analysis of the H216O and H218O (110-101) lines, we find that the column density can vary by two orders of magnitude in this region. The highest column density is observed in a narrow region on the dayside, close to the neck and north pole rotation axis of the nucleus, while the lowest column density is seen against the nightside of the nucleus where outgassing seems to be very low. We estimate that the outgassing pattern can be represented by a Gaussian distribution in a solid angle with FWHM ≈ 80°.
Measuring redshifted CO line emission is an unambiguous method for obtaining an accurate redshift and total cold gas content of optically faint, dusty starburst systems. Here, we report the first ...successful spectroscopic redshift determination of AzTEC J095942.9+022938 (‘COSMOS AzTEC-1’), the brightest 1.1 mm continuum source found in the AzTEC/James Clerk Maxwell Telescope survey (Scott et al.), through a clear detection of the redshifted CO (4–3) and CO (5–4) lines using the Redshift Search Receiver on the Large Millimeter Telescope. The CO redshift of z = 4.3420 ± 0.0004 is confirmed by the detection of the redshifted 158 μm C ii line using the Submillimeter Array. The new redshift and Herschel photometry yield L
FIR = (1.1 ± 0.1) × 1013 L⊙ and SFR ≈ 1300 M⊙ yr−1. Its molecular gas mass derived using the ultraluminous infrared galaxy conversion factor is 1.4 ± 0.2 × 1011M⊙ while the total interstellar medium mass derived from the 1.1 mm dust continuum is 3.7 ± 0.7 × 1011M⊙ assuming T
d = 35 K. Our dynamical mass analysis suggests that the compact gas disc (r ≈ 1.1 kpc, inferred from dust continuum and spectral energy distribution analysis) has to be nearly face-on, providing a natural explanation for the uncommonly bright, compact stellar light seen by the HST. The C ii line luminosity
$L_{\rm C\,\small {II}}= 7.8\pm 1.1 \times 10^9 \,\mathrm{L}_{\odot }$
is remarkably high, but it is only 0.04 per cent of the total IR luminosity. AzTEC COSMOS-1 and other high redshift sources with a spatially resolved size extend the tight trend seen between C ii/FIR ratio and ΣFIR among IR-bright galaxies reported by Díaz-Santos et al. by more than an order of magnitude, supporting the explanation that the higher intensity of the IR radiation field is responsible for the ‘C ii deficiency’ seen among luminous starburst galaxies.
We present first results of an experiment to combine data from Keck aperture masking and the Infrared-Optical Telescope Array to image the circumstellar environments of evolved stars with approx20 ...mas resolution. The unique combination of excellent Fourier coverage at short baselines and high- quality long-baseline fringe data allows us to determine the location and clumpiness of the innermost hot dust in the envelopes and to measure the diameters of the underlying stars themselves. We find evidence for large-scale inhomogeneities in some dust shells and also significant deviations from uniform brightness for the photospheres of the most evolved M stars. Deviations from spherically symmetric mass loss in the red supergiant NML Cyg could be related to recent evidence for dynamically important magnetic fields and/or stellar rotation. We point out that dust shell asymmetries, like those observed here, can qualitatively explain the difficulty recent workers have had in simultaneously fitting the broadband spectral energy distributions and high-resolution spatial information, without invoking unusual dust properties or multiple distinct shells (from hypothetical "superwinds"). This paper is the first to combine optical interferometry data from multiple facilities for imaging, and we discuss the challenges and potential for the future of this method, given current calibration and software limitations.
Abstract
Observations of
12
CO
J
= 1 – 0 and HCN
J
= 1 – 0 emission from NGC 5194 (M51) made with the 50 m Large Millimeter Telescope and the SEQUOIA focal plane array are presented. Using the ...HCN-to-CO ratio, we examine the dense gas mass fraction over a range of environmental conditions within the galaxy. Within the disk, the dense gas mass fraction varies along the spiral arms but the average value over all spiral arms is comparable to the mean value of interarm regions. We suggest that the near-constant dense gas mass fraction throughout the disk arises from a population of density-stratified, self-gravitating molecular clouds and the required density threshold to detect each spectral line. The measured dense gas fraction significantly increases in the central bulge in response to the effective pressure,
P
e
, from the weight of the stellar and gas components. This pressure modifies the dynamical state of the molecular cloud population and, possibly, the HCN-emitting regions in the central bulge from self-gravitating to diffuse configurations in which
P
e
is greater than the gravitational energy density of individual clouds. Diffuse molecular clouds comprise a significant fraction of the molecular gas mass in the central bulge, which may account for the measured sublinear relationships between the surface densities of the star formation rate and molecular and dense gas.
Abstract
Sensitive, imaging observations of the λ1.1 mm dust continuum emission from a 1 deg2 area collected with the AzTEC bolometer camera on the Large Millimeter Telescope are presented. A ...catalogue of 1545 compact sources is constructed based on a Wiener-optimization filter. These sources are linked to larger clump structures identified in the Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey. Hydrogen column densities are calculated for all sources and mass and mean volume densities are derived for the subset of sources for which kinematic distances can be assigned. The AzTEC sources are localized, high-density peaks within the massive clumps of molecular clouds and comprise 5–15 per cent of the clump mass. We examine the role of the gravitational instability in generating these fragments by comparing the mass of embedded AzTEC sources to the Jeans mass of the parent BGPS object. For sources with distances less than 6 kpc the fragment masses are comparable to the clump Jeans mass, despite having isothermal Mach numbers between 1.6 and 7.2. AzTEC sources linked to ultra compact H ii regions have mass surface densities greater than the critical value implied by the mass–size relationship of infrared dark clouds with high-mass star formation, while AzTEC sources associated with Class II methanol masers have mass surface densities greater than 0.7 g cm−2 that approaches the proposed threshold required to form massive stars.
Using the three-telescope IOTA interferometer on Mount Hopkins, we report results from the first near-infrared (l = 1.65 km) closure-phase survey of young stellar objects (YSOs). These closure phases ...allow us to unambiguously detect departures from centrosymmetry (i.e., skew) in the emission pattern from YSO disks on the scale of 64 mas, expected from generic "flared disk" models. Six of 14 targets showed small, yet statistically significant nonzero closure phases, with largest values from the young binary system MWC 361-A and the (pre main-sequence?) Be star HD 45677. Our observations are quite sensitive to the vertical structure of the inner disk, and we confront the predictions of the "puffed-up inner wall" models of Dullemond, Dominik, & Natta (DDN). Our data support disk models with curved inner rims because the expected emission appears symmetrically distributed around the star over a wide range of inclination angles. In contrast, our results are incompatible with the models possessing vertical inner walls because they predict extreme skewness (i.e., large closure phases) from the near-IR disk emission that is not seen in our data. In addition, we also present the discovery of mysterious H-band "halos" (65%-10% of light on scales 0."01-0."50) around a few objects, a preliminary "parametric imaging" study for HD 45677, and the first astrometric orbit for the young binary MWC 361-A.
Aims. We present the spatial and diurnal variation of water outgassing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko using the H216O rotational transition line at 556.936 GHz observed from Rosetta/MIRO in ...August 2014. Methods. The water line was analyzed with a non-LTE radiative transfer model and an optimal estimation method to retrieve the H216O outgassing intensity, expansion velocity, and gas kinetic temperature. On August 7−9, 2014 and August 18−19, 2014, MIRO performed long steady nadir-pointing observations of the nucleus while it was rotating around its spin axis. The ground track of the MIRO beam during the observation was mostly on the northern hemisphere of comet 67P, covering its three distinct parts: the so-called head, body, and neck areas. Results. The MIRO spectral observation data show that the water-outgassing intensity varies by a factor of 30, from 0.1 × 1025 molecules s-1 sr-1 to 3.0 × 1025 molecules s-1 sr-1, the terminal gas expansion velocity varies by 0.17 km s-1 from 0.61 km s-1 to 0.78 km s-1, and the terminal gas temperature varies by 27 K from 47 K to 74 K. The retrieved coma parameters are co-registered with local environment variables such as the subsurface temperatures, measured in the MIRO continuum bands, the local solar time, illumination condition, and beam location on nucleus. The spatial variation of the outgassing activity is very noticeable, and the largest outgassing activity in August 2014 occurs near the neck region of the nucleus. The outgassing activity in the neck region is also found to be correlated with the local solar hour, which is related to the local illumination condition.
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