Molecular Gas Density Measured with H 2 CO and CS toward a Spiral Arm of M51

Abstract

Observations of various molecular lines toward a disk region of a nearby galaxy are now feasible, and they are being employed as diagnostic tools to study star formation activities there. However, the spatial resolution attainable for a nearby galaxy with currently available radio telescopes is 10–1000 pc, which is much larger than the scales of individual star-forming regions and molecular-cloud cores. Hence, it is of fundamental importance to elucidate which part of an interstellar medium such spatially unresolved observations are tracing. Here we present sensitive measurements of the H 2 CO ( ) line at 72 GHz toward giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in the spiral arm of M51 using the NRO 45 m and IRAM 30 m telescopes. In conjunction with the previously observed H 2 CO (2 02  − 1 01 ) and CS (2 − 1 and 3 − 2) lines, we derive the H 2 density of the emitting regions to be (0.6–2.6) × 10 4 cm −3 and (2.9–12) × 10 4 cm −3 for H 2 CO and CS, respectively, by the non-LTE analyses, where we assume the source size of 0.8–1 kpc and the gas kinetic temperature of 10–20 K. The derived H 2 density indicates that the emission of H 2 CO and CS is not localized to star-forming cores, but is likely distributed over an entire region of GMCs. Such widespread distributions of H 2 CO and CS are also supported by models assuming lognormal density distributions over the 1 kpc region. Thus, contributions from the widespread less dense components should be taken into account for interpretation of the molecular emission observed with a GMC-scale resolution. The different H 2 densities derived for H 2 CO and CS imply their different distributions. We discuss these differences in terms of the formation processes of H 2 CO and CS.