Issue |
A&A
Volume 695, March 2025
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A202 | |
Number of page(s) | 10 | |
Section | Extragalactic astronomy | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202553891 | |
Published online | 24 March 2025 |
JWST Observations of Starbursts: Relations between PAH features and CO clouds in the starburst galaxy M 82
1
Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Concepción, Barrio Universitario, Concepción, Chile
2
Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
3
Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
4
Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC 3122, Australia
5
ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D)
6
Department of Astronomy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
7
IPAC, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
8
Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071, USA
9
Sterrenkundig Observatorium, Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281 – S9, B9000 Ghent, Belgium
10
Departamento Física Teórica y del Cosmos, Universidad de Granada, E-18071 Granada, Spain
11
Instituto Universitario Carlos I de Física Teórica y Computacional, Universidad de Granada, E-18071 Granada, Spain
12
European Space Agency, c/o STScI, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
13
Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, PO Box 9513 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
14
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, PO Box O, 1003 Lopezville Road, Socorro, NM 87801, USA
15
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, 801 Leroy Place, Socorro, NM 87801, USA
16
IPAC, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
17
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 520 Edgemont Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA
18
Millenium Nucleus for Galaxies, MINGAL
19
Ritter Astrophysical Research Center, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH 43606, USA
20
Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
21
Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
⋆
Corresponding author; fumitaka.nakamura@nao.ac.jp
Received:
24
January
2025
Accepted:
24
February
2025
We present a study of new 7.7–11.3 μm data obtained with the James Webb Space Telescope Mid-InfraRed Instrument in the starburst galaxy M 82. In particular, we focus on the dependency of the integrated CO(1–0) line intensity on the MIRI-F770W and MIRI-F1130W filter intensities to investigate the correlation between H2 content and the 7.7 and 11.3 μm features from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in M 82’s outflows. To perform our analysis, we identify CO clouds using the archival 12CO(J = 1 − 0) NOEMA moment 0 map within 2 kpc from the center of M 82, with sizes ranging between ∼21 and 270 pc; then, we compute the CO-to-PAH relations for the 306 validated CO clouds. On average, the power-law slopes for the two relations in M 82 are lower than what is seen in local main-sequence spirals. In addition, there is a moderate correlation between ICO(1 − 0) − I7.7 μm/I11.3 μm for some of the CO cloud groups analyzed in this work. Our results suggest that the extreme conditions in M 82 translate into CO not tracing the full budget of molecular gas in smaller clouds, perhaps as a consequence of photoionization and/or emission suppression of CO molecules due to hard radiation fields from the central starburst.
Key words: galaxies: ISM / quasars: emission lines / galaxies: starburst
© The Authors 2025
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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