Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS
Volume 681, Issue 2, Pages L73-L76Publisher
UNIV CHICAGO PRESS
DOI: 10.1086/590181
Keywords
galaxies : evolution; galaxies : ISM; submillimeter
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We present observations made with the 10 m Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope of HCN(3-2) emission from a sample of 30 nearby galaxies ranging in infrared luminosity from 10(10) to 10(12.5) L-circle dot and HCN(3-2) luminosity from 10(6) to 10(9) K km s(-1) pc(2). We examine the correlation between the infrared luminosity and HCN(3-2) luminosity and find that the best-fit linear regression has a slope (in log-log space) of. Including 0.74 +/- 0.12 recently published data from Gracia-Carpio et al. tightens the constraints on the best-fit slope to. 0.79 +/- 0.09 This slope below unity suggests that the HCN(3-2) molecular line luminosity is not linearly tracing the amount of dense gas. Our results are consistent with predictions from recent theoretical models that find slopes below unity when the line luminosity depends on the average gas density with a power-law index greater than a Kennicutt-Schmidt index of 1.5.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available