GIANT MOLECULAR CLOUDS AND STAR FORMATION IN THE NON-GRAND DESIGN SPIRAL GALAXY NGC 6946

We present high spatial resolution observations of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in the eastern part of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 6946 obtained with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA). We have observed CO(1 -> 0), CO(2 -> 1) and (CO)-C-13(1 -> 0), achieving spatial resolutions of 5.'' 4 x 5.'' 0, 2.'' 5 x 2.'' 0, and 5.'' 6 x 5.'' 4, respectively, over a region of 6 x 6 kpc. This region extends from 1.5 kpc to 8 kpc galactocentric radius, thus avoiding the intense star formation in the central kpc. We have recovered short-spacing u-v components by using single dish observations from the Nobeyama 45 m and IRAM 30 m telescopes. Using the automated CPROPS algorithm, we identified 45 CO cloud complexes in the CO(1 -> 0) map and 64 GMCs in the CO(2 -> 1) maps. The sizes, line widths, and luminosities of the GMCs are similar to values found in other extragalactic studies. We have classified the clouds into on-arm and inter-arm clouds based on the stellar mass density traced by the 3.6 mu m map. Clouds located on-arm present in general higher star formation rates than clouds located in inter-arm regions. Although the star formation efficiency shows no systematic trend with galactocentric radius, some on-arm clouds-which are more luminous and more massive compared to inter-arm GMCs-are also forming stars more efficiently than the rest of the identified GMCs. We find that these structures appear to be located in two specific regions in the spiral arms. One of them shows a strong velocity gradient, suggesting that this region of high star formation efficiency may be the result of gas flow convergence.