The BIMA Survey of Nearby Galaxies (BIMA SONG). II. The CO Data

By T. Helfer, M. Thornley, M. Regan, T. Wong, K. Sheth, S. Vogel, L. Blitz, D. Bock. 2002

385 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The BIMA Survey of Nearby Galaxies is a systematic imaging study of the 3 mm CO J = 1-0 molecular emission within the centers and disks of 44 nearby spiral galaxies. The typical spatial resolution of the survey is 6″ or 360 pc at the average distance (12 Mpc) of the sample. The velocity resolution of the CO observations is 4 km s-1, though most maps are smoothed to 10 km s-1 resolution. For 33 galaxies, multifield observations ensured that a region ≳190″ (〈D〉 = 10 kpc) in diameter was imaged. For the remaining 11 galaxies, which had smaller optical diameters and were on average farther away, single-pointing observations imaged a 100″ diameter (〈D〉 = 11 kpc) region. The sample was not chosen based on CO or infrared brightness; instead, all spirals were included that met the selection criteria of v⊙ ≤ 2000 km s-1, δ ≥ -20°, i ≤ 70°, D25 < 70′, and BT < 11.0. The detection rate was 41/44 sources or 93%; of the three nondetections, one (M81) is known to have CO emission at locations outside the survey field of view. Fully sampled single-dish CO data were incorporated into the maps for 24 galaxies; these single-dish data comprise the most extensive collection of fully sampled, two-dimensional single-dish CO maps of external galaxies to date. We also tabulate direct measurements of the global CO flux densities for these 24 sources. For the remaining 20 sources, we collected sensitive single-dish spectra in order to evaluate the large-scale flux recovery. We demonstrate that the measured ratios of flux density recovered are a function of the signal-to-noise of the interferometric data. We examine the degree of central peakedness of the molecular surface density distributions and show that the distributions exhibit their brightest CO emission within the central 6″ in only 20/44 or 45% of the sample. We show that all three Local Group spiral galaxies have CO morphologies that are represented in SONG, though the Milky Way CO luminosity is somewhat below the SONG average, and M31 and M33 are well below average. This survey provides a unique public database of integrated intensity maps, channel maps, spectra, and velocity fields of molecular emission in nearby galaxies. It also lays the groundwork for extragalactic surveys by more powerful future millimeter-wavelength interferometers like CARMA and ALMA.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16dc7bf0e599c63b9eaab8f97bfdbec70f4a7bd5

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Star formation in semi-analytic galaxy formation models with multiphase gas (2015, background): “…and multi-phase (Hi and H2) gas in reasonably large samples of nearby galaxies, e.g. from the THINGS (The HI nearby galaxy survey; Walter et al. 2008) combined with BIMA SONG (BIMA survey of Nearby Galaxies; Helfer et al. 2003) and HERACLES (HERA COLine Extragalactic Survey; Leroy et al. 2009).”
Kinemetry: a generalization of photometry to the higher moments of the line-of-sight velocity distribution (2005, background): “Such maps were the result of studies of, e.g., HI with radio interferometers, (e.g. Swaters et al. 2002), CO with millimetre interferometers (e.g. Helfer et al. 2003) and Hα with Fabry-Perot spectrographs (e.g. Hernandez et al. 2005).”
Star Formation in NGC 5194 (M51a). II. The Spatially Resolved Star Formation Law (2007, methodology): “The CO J=1–0 map of M51a was obtained as part of the BIMA Survey Of Nearby Galaxies (BIMA SONG), and details on the data taking and processing can be found in Helfer et al. (2003).”
A Survey of Kiloparsec-Scale Radio Outflows in Radio-Quiet Active Galactic Nuclei (2006, background): “0 line, which acts as a proxy for the nuclear gas mass (e.g., Helfer et al. 2003 and references therein).”
The Resolved Properties of Extragalactic Giant Molecular Clouds (2008, result): “These observations are considerably deeper than those from the BIMA Survey of Nearby Galaxies (SONG; Helfer et al. 2003).”
Secular Evolution via Bar-driven Gas Inflow: Results from BIMA SONG (2005, methodology): “Our typical 6′′ beam subtends an area of diameter of <1 kiloparsec for almost all galaxies in our sample, as can be seen in Table 2 in Helfer et al. (2003) where the area subtended is shown in the plane of the sky.”
The ATLAS3D project - XIV. The extent and kinematics of the molecular gas in early-type galaxies (2012, methodology): “We caution, however, that Helfer et al. (2003) showed that they often resolved out significant fractions of the flux in these spiral galaxies.”
SIMULATION OF THE COSMIC EVOLUTION OF ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR HYDROGEN IN GALAXIES (2009, methodology): “To parameterize the dependence of the scale radius on the morphological galaxy type, the latter shall be 2 Stellar masses Mstars rely on 3.6µm-maps (SINGS, Kennicutt et al. 2003); HI-masses use the 21 cm-maps from THINGS (Walter et al. 2008), H2-masses rely on CO-maps (CO(2– 1) from HERACLES, Leroy ”
HERACLES: THE HERA CO LINE EXTRAGALACTIC SURVEY (2009, background): “We use two data sets drawn from BIMA SONG: on-the-fly maps made with the NRAO 12-m (resolution 55′′) and the combined BIMA + 12-m data (typical resolution ∼ 6′′).”
Nobeyama CO Atlas of Nearby Spiral Galaxies: Distribution of Molecular Gas in Barred and Nonbarred Spiral Galaxies (2007, background): “On the other hand, surveys observed with interferometers revealed detailed structures of molecular gas, especially in the central region of galaxies (e.g., Sakamoto et al. 1999a; Regan et al. 2001; Sofue et al. 2003a; Helfer et al. 2003).”
THE STAR FORMATION EFFICIENCY IN NEARBY GALAXIES: MEASURING WHERE GAS FORMS STARS EFFECTIVELY (2008, neutral): “…14.2 302 0.6 10.8 10.1 8.5 0.741 4.0 5.3 · · · NGC 5055 10.1 59 102 Sbc -20.6 17.4 192 0.7 10.8 10.1 9.7 2.123 3.2 3.1 3.1 NGC 7331 14.7 76 168 SAb -21.7 19.6 244 1.3 10.9 10.1 9.7 2.987 3.3 4.5 3.1 a Unless noted log M H2 comes from HERACLES Leroy et al. (2008) or BIMA SONG (Helfer et al. 2003).”
THE ATOMIC-TO-MOLECULAR TRANSITION IN GALAXIES. II: H i AND H2 COLUMN DENSITIES (2008, methodology): “The H2 surface densities are inferred from CO observations taken as part of the BIMA SONG survey (Regan et al. 2001; Helfer et al. 2003), while the Hi observations are from the VLA.”
THE STRUCTURE OF CLASSICAL BULGES AND PSEUDOBULGES: THE LINK BETWEEN PSEUDOBULGES AND SÉRSIC INDEX (2008, background): “Helfer et al. (2003) show that many CO gas maps of bulge-disk galaxies have holes in their center, but also many CO profiles rise steeply to their center.”
Evolution of the atomic and molecular gas content of galaxies (2013, background): “The BIMA SONG (BIMA survey of nearby galaxies: Helfer et al. 2003), HERACLES (HERA CO-Line Extragalactic Survey: Leroy et al. 2009) and COLD GASS (CO legacy database for GASS: Saintonge et al. 2011) surveys mapped the COemitting gas in galaxies of the THINGS and GASS surveys, constraining the…”
THE BARYONIC TULLY–FISHER RELATION OF GAS-RICH GALAXIES AS A TEST OF ΛCDM AND MOND (2011, background): “However, the size of the stellar and molecular disk are usually similar (Helfer et al. 2003).”
The Starburst Contribution to the Extragalactic γ-Ray Background (2006, result): “Comparing our analytic estimate in equation (6) 9 The Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 1068 with g 0:1 g cm 2 (Helfer et al. 2003) would be fourth in Table 1with F (GeV) 11:8 f ; 10 11 GeVcm 2 s 1, where f is the fraction of the infrared emission due to the nuclear starburst rather than the active galactic…”
The Role of Pressure in GMC Formation II: The H2-Pressure Relation (2006, methodology): “Most of the H I data are from the VLA and the most of the CO data are from the BIMA Survey of Nearby Galaxies (Helfer et al. 2003).”
Secular Evolution and the Formation of Pseudobulges in Disk Galaxies (2004, methodology): “The presence and masses of these disks are strongly enhanced in barred galaxies (Sakamoto et al. 1999, Helfer et al. 2003), as is the case for central star formation.”