Gas and dust in the extremely red object ERO J164502+4626.4

We report the first detection of the lowest CO transition in a submillimeter bright galaxy and extremely red object (ERO) at z = 1.44 using the Very Large Array (VLA).(1) The total J = 1-0 line luminosity of ERO J164502+4626.4 is (7 +/- 1) x 10(10) K km s(-1) pc(2), which yields a total molecular gas mass of similar to6 x 10(10) M-circle dot. We also present a map of the 850 mum continuum emission obtained using the Submillimeter Common-User Bolometric Array, from which we infer a far-IR luminosity and dust mass of L-FIR similar to 9 x 10(12) L-circle dot and M-d similar to 9 x 10(8) M-circle dot, respectively. We find tentative evidence that the CO and submillimeter dust emission is extended over several tens of kiloparsecs. If confirmed by high-resolution imaging, this implies that ERO J164502+4626.4 is not simply a high-redshift-counterpart of a typical ultra luminous infrared galaxy (ULIRG).