A giant molecular cloud catalogue in the molecular disc of the elliptical galaxy NGC5128 (Centaurus A)

We sincerely thank the referee (Erik Rosolowsky) for the careful reading and useful comments to improve our manuscript. We would also like to show our gratitude to him for the kind assistance with the usage of CPROPS in the early stages of this work. REM was supported by the ALMA Japan Research Grant of NAOJ ALMA Project, NAOJ-ALMA-222. DE was supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant number JP 17K14254. DE was supported by the ALMA Japan Research Grant of NAOJ ALMA Project, NAOJ-ALMA-0093. MINK was supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant number JP 15J04974. KK was supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant number JP17H06130 and the NAOJ ALMA Scientific Research grant number 2017-06B. SV acknowledges support by the research projects AYA2014-53506-P and AYA2017-84897-P from the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, and by the Consejer ' ia de Conocimiento, Investigaci ' on y Universidad, Junta de Andaluc ' ia (FQM108) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)". This study has been partially financed by the Consejer ' ia de Conocimiento, Investigaci ' on y Universidad, Junta de Andaluc ' ia and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), ref. SOMM17/6105/UGR. Part of this work was achieved using the grant of Visiting Scholars Program supported by the Research Coordination Committee, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), National Institutes ofNatural Sciences (NINS). SM would like to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan, MOST 107-2119-M-001-020. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System. This research has made use of Astropy, a community-developed core PYTHON (http://www.python.org) package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration 2013, 2018); IPYTHON (Perez & Granger 2007); MATPLOTLIB (Hunter 2007); APLPY, an open-source plotting package for PYTHON (Robitaille & Bressert 2012), and NUMPY (van derWalt, Colbert & Varoquaux 2011). Data analysis was in part carried out on the open use data analysis computer system at the Astronomy Data Center, ADC, of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: ADS/JAO.ALMA#2013.1.00803.S. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada), MOST and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic ofKorea), in cooperationwith theRepublic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ. The NationalRadio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
We present the first census of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) complete down to 106M and within the inner 4 kpc of the nearest giant elliptical and powerful radio galaxy, Centaurus A. We identified 689 GMCs using CO(1–0) data with 1 arcsec spatial resolution (∼20 pc) and 2 kms−1 velocity resolution obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. The I(CO)-N(H2) conversion factor based on the virial method is XCO = (2 ± 1) × 1020 cm−2(K km s−1)−1 for the entire molecular disc, consistent with that of the discs of spiral galaxies including the Milky Way, and XCO = (5 ± 2) × 1020 cm−2(K km s−1)−1 for the circumnuclear disc (CND; within a galactocentric radius of 200 pc). We obtained the GMC mass spectrum distribution and find that the best truncated power-law fit for the whole molecular disc, with index γ −2.41 ± 0.02 and upper cut-off mass ∼1.3 × 107M , is also in agreement with that of nearby disc galaxies. A trend is found in the mass spectrum index from steep to shallow as we move to inner radii. Although the GMCs are in an elliptical galaxy, the general GMC properties in the molecular disc are as in spiral galaxies. However, in the CND, large offsets in the line-width-size scaling relations (∼0.3 dex higher than those in the GMCs in the molecular disc), a different XCO factor, and the shallowest GMC mass distribution shape (γ = −1.1 ± 0.2) all suggest that there the GMCs are most strongly affected by the presence of the active galactic nucleus and/or shear motions.
ALMA Japan Research Grant of NAOJ ALMA Project NAOJ-ALMA-222 NAOJ-ALMA-0093
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (MEXT) Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) JP 17K14254 JP 15J04974 JP17H06130
NAOJ ALMA Scientific Research grant 2017-06B
Spanish Government AYA2014-53506-P AYA2017-84897-P
Junta de Andalucia FQM108
European Commission SOMM17/6105/UGR
Research Coordination Committee, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), National Institutes ofNatural Sciences (NINS)
Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan MOST 107-2119-M-001-020 2013.1.00803.S