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تسجيل مستخدم جديدThe PdBI Arcsecond Whirlpool Survey (PAWS). I. A Cloud-Scale/Multi-Wavelength View of the Interstellar Medium in a Grand-Design Spiral Galaxy
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تأليف
Eva Schinnerer
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The PdBI (Plateau de Bure Interferometer) Arcsecond Whirlpool Survey (PAWS) has mapped the molecular gas in the central ~9kpc of M51 in its 12CO(1-0) line emission at cloud-scale resolution of ~40pc using both IRAM telescopes. We utilize this dataset to quantitatively characterize the relation of molecular gas (or CO emission) to other tracers of the interstellar medium (ISM), star formation and stellar populations of varying ages. Using 2-dimensional maps, a polar cross-correlation technique and pixel-by-pixel diagrams, we find: (a) that (as expected) the distribution of the molecular gas can be linked to different components of the gravitational potential, (b) evidence for a physical link between CO line emission and radio continuum that seems not to be caused by massive stars, but rather depend on the gas density, (c) a close spatial relation between the PAH and molecular gas emission, but no predictive power of PAH emission for the molecular gas mass,(d) that the I-H color map is an excellent predictor of the distribution (and to a lesser degree the brightness) of CO emission, and (e) that the impact of massive (UV-intense) young star-forming regions on the bulk of the molecular gas in central ~9kpc can not be significant due to a complex spatial relation between molecular gas and star-forming regions that ranges from co-spatial to spatially offset to absent. The last point, in particular, highlights the importance of galactic environment -- and thus the underlying gravitational potential -- for the distribution of molecular gas and star formation.
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The process that leads to the formation of the bright star forming sites observed along prominent spiral arms remains elusive. We present results of a multi-wavelength study of a spiral arm segment in the nearby grand-design spiral galaxy M51 that be
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cent studies have argued that the old stellar population might anticipate a non-negligible fraction of the radiative dust heating. Aims: In this work, we aim to analyze the contribution of young (< 100 Myr) and old (~ 10 Gyr) stellar populations to radiative dust heating processes in the nearby grand-design spiral galaxy M51 using radiative transfer modeling. High-resolution 3D radiative transfer (RT) models are required to describe the complex morphologies of asymmetric spiral arms and clumpy star-forming regions and model the propagation of light through a dusty medium. Methods: In this paper, we present a new technique developed to model the radiative transfer effects in nearby face-on galaxies. We construct a high-resolution 3D radiative transfer model with the Monte-Carlo code SKIRT accounting for the absorption, scattering and non-local thermal equilibrium (NLTE) emission of dust in M51. The 3D distribution of stars is derived from the 2D morphology observed in the IRAC 3.6 {mu}m, GALEX FUV, H{alpha} and MIPS 24 {mu}m wavebands, assuming an exponential vertical distribution with an appropriate scale height. The dust geometry is constrained through the far-ultraviolet (FUV) attenuation, which is derived from the observed total-infrared-to-far-ultraviolet luminosity ratio. The stellar luminosity, star formation rate and dust mass have been scaled to reproduce the observed stellar spectral energy distribution (SED), FUV attenuation and infrared SED. (abridged)
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