COLD GASS, an IRAM legacy survey of molecular gas in massive galaxies - II. The non-universality of the molecular gas depletion time-scale

By A. Saintonge, G. Kauffmann, Jing Wang, C. Kramer, L. Tacconi, C. Buchbender, B. Catinella, J. Graciá-Carpio, L. Cortese, S. Fabello and 14 more. 2011

294 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the relation between molecular gas and star formation in a volume-limited sample of 222 galaxies from the COLD GASS survey, with measurements of the CO(1–0) line from the IRAM 30-m telescope. The galaxies are at redshifts 0.025 < z < 0.05 and have stellar masses in the range 10.0 < log M� /M� < 11.5. The IRAM measurements are complemented by deep Arecibo H I observations and homogeneous Sloan Digital Sky Survey and GALEX photometry. A reference sample that includes both ultraviolet (UV) and far-infrared data is used to calibrate our estimates of star formation rates from the seven optical/UV bands. The mean molecular gas depletion time-scale [tdep(H2)] for all the galaxies in our sample is 1 Gyr; however, tdep(H2) increases by a factor of 6 from a value of ∼0.5 Gyr for galaxies with stellar –

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• THE IMPACT OF INTERACTIONS, BARS, BULGES, AND ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI ON STAR FORMATION EFFICIENCY IN LOCAL MASSIVE GALAXIES (2012, methodology): “A full description of the instrumental setup, observing strategy and data reduction procedure is presented in Saintonge et al. (2011a).”
• PHIBSS: MOLECULAR GAS CONTENT AND SCALING RELATIONS IN z ∼ 1–3 MASSIVE, MAIN-SEQUENCE STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2012, background): “In the local Universe the ratio of atomic to molecular gas masses in logM*~10…11 SFGs is about 1.5-2 (Saintonge et al. 2011a), and the atomic gas dominates the mass of the cold ISM.”
• THE KMOS3D SURVEY: DESIGN, FIRST RESULTS, AND THE EVOLUTION OF GALAXY KINEMATICS FROM 0.7 ⩽ z ⩽ 2.7 (2014, background): “The evolution of the tdepl and evolution of sSFR are strongly linked (Saintonge et al. 2011; Tacconi et al. 2013; Genzel et al. 2014a).”
• METALLICITY-DEPENDENT QUENCHING OF STAR FORMATION AT HIGH REDSHIFT IN SMALL GALAXIES (2011, result): “For comparison, at z = 0 we show the results of COLD GASS (Saintonge et al. 2011a,b), a volume-limited survey of CO line emission (used as a proxy to infer H2) in several hundred galaxies at distances of 100− 200 Mpc, selected to have stellar masses M∗ > 10 10 M .”
• THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY: THE GALAXY POPULATION DETECTED BY ALFALFA (2012, background): “Such estimates have overall larger uncertainties among the red-sequence galaxies relative to the blue cloud ones (e.g. Saintonge et al. 2011b), and contribute to the SFR uncertainties.”
• PHIBSS: Unified Scaling Relations of Gas Depletion Time and Molecular Gas Fractions (2017, methodology): “Since μgas=sSFR×tdepl this implies that gas fractions track the mass-dependence of sSFR, (Saintonge et al. 2011b).”
• The Formation and Destruction of Molecular Clouds and Galactic Star Formation (2015, background): “There are many report that the Kennicutt-Schmidt correlation varies with some properties of galaxies (e.g., Saintonge et al. 2011, 2012; Meidt et al. 2013; Davis et al. 2014).”
• Molecular and atomic gas along and across the main sequence of star-forming galaxies (2016, methodology): “Comparing the values ofS FRtot with the measurements from optical-UV SED fitting (Saintonge et al. 2011b) reveals no systematic offset and a 0.3 dex scatter, in complete agreement with Huang & Kauffmann(2014) who also derived SFRs based on GALEXandWISEphotometry for COLD GASS galaxies.”
• FORMING REALISTIC LATE-TYPE SPIRALS IN A ΛCDM UNIVERSE: THE ERIS SIMULATION (2011, background): “The depletion time for atomic gas observed in the COLD GASS survey (Saintonge et al. 2011) is on average 3 Gyr, with a large scatter from one galaxy to another.”
• A UNIVERSAL, LOCAL STAR FORMATION LAW IN GALACTIC CLOUDS, NEARBY GALAXIES, HIGH-REDSHIFT DISKS, AND STARBURSTS (2011, unknown): “In the unbiased sample provided by the COLDGASS survey (Saintonge et al. 2011a,b), the H2 depletion time, defined as tdep,H2 = MH2 Ṁ∗ , (15) is continuously rather than bimodally distributed, and the data occupy the full range of values between the sequences of disks and starbursts identified by…”
• MOLECULAR GAS AND STAR FORMATION IN NEARBY DISK GALAXIES (2013, background): “…offer good evidence that ΣSFR relates to ΣHI and Σmol in fundamentally different ways (L08, B08 Wong & Blitz 2002; Schruba et al. 2011) and that ΣSFR is even a multivalued function of Σmol (Daddi et al. 2010; Genzel et al. 2010; Schruba et al. 2011; Saintonge et al. 2011, 2012, and this paper).”
• Cold gas properties of the Herschel Reference Survey - II. Molecular and total gas scaling relations (2014, methodology): “Th difference in slope is more pronunced when, consistently with Saintonge et al. (2011a), the fit is done on molecular gas masses determined assuming a constantXCO11.”
• SDSS IV MaNGA – spatially resolved diagnostic diagrams: a proof that many galaxies are LIERs (2016, background): “These two sequences are clearly separated not only in their integrated optical and UV colours (Wyder et al. 2007), but also in their stellar populations (e.g Kauffmann et al. 2003a), cold gas content and ionised gas properties (Kewley et al. 2006; Saintonge et al. 2011).”
• The ATLAS3D Project – XXVIII. Dynamically driven star formation suppression in early-type galaxies (2014, background): “In fact, even at fixed gas fraction, molecule-rich ETGs form stars less efficiently than normal spirals, and very much less efficiently than high-redshift starburst galaxies (Saintonge et al. 2011, 2012; Martig et al. 2013, hereafter Paper XXII).”
• The big problems in star formation: The star formation rate, stellar clustering, and the initial mass function (2014, background): “…et al. 2009; Rahman et al. 2011, 2012; Leroy et al. 2013), or varies slightly with the gas surface density or other large-scale properties of a galaxy (Ken- nicutt et al. 2007; Liu et al. 2011; Saintonge et al. 2011; Calzetti et al. 2012; Meidt et al. 2013; Momose et al. 2013; Shetty et al. 2013).”
• A Herschel view of the far-infrared properties of submillimetre galaxies (2012, unknown): “9 of Saintonge et al. 2011).”
• How sensitive are predicted galaxy luminosities to the choice of stellar population synthesis model (2013, background): “Moreover, some observations indicate that massive and passively evolving galaxies (as most of the predicted EROs are) could have gas depletion timescales even longer than the 2 Gyr assumed in our model (Saintonge et al. 2011; Martig et al. 2013) and, thus, even further away from the old one.”
• THE DEPENDENCE OF QUENCHING UPON THE INNER STRUCTURE OF GALAXIES AT 0.5 ⩽ z < 0.8 IN THE DEEP2/AEGIS SURVEY (2012, background): “The same result applies to molecular H2 in the same galaxies (Saintonge et al. 2011).”
• Cool outflows in galaxies and their implications (2020, background): “…on & kpc scales (e.g., Bigiel et al. 2008), although tdep tends to decrease with increasing specific star formation rates, both spatially integrated (Ṁ∗/M∗; Saintonge et al. 2011) and spatially resolved (ΣSFR/Σ∗; Ellison et al. 2019), and there is considerable scatter on scales below ∼100 Cool…”