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Session 109 - Seyferts.
Oral session, Thursday, January 16
Piers 4/5,
We present new 1.5^\prime\prime spatial resolution ^12CO J=2\rightarrow1 observations made with the IRAM interferometer at the Plateau de Bure, France. With these data, in combination with high resolution maps of other CO transitions, we derive the kinematic properties of the dense molecular gas concentration known to exist in the central few hundred parsecs of this Seyfert 2 galaxy. The stellar and gaseous bar, seen clearly at near infrared and millimeter wavelengths, plays a major role in the kinematics of the central regions of NGC 1068. The observed velocities in these regions cannot be due to pure circular rotation, and very large (> 100 km/s) local turbulent velocities and elliptical streaming motions along the bar are almost certainly dominating the kinematics there. At 1.5^\prime\prime (\sim100 pc) resolution, the central gas concentration has a clumpy, double peaked structure, oriented roughly perpendicular to the large-scale bar. Such structures have been seen in other barred galaxies at several hundred parsec scales, and are believed to be evidence for gas orbit crowding near inner Lindblad resonances. Our work suggests that gas inflow along the bar could be an efficient mechanism to bring fuel to the center to feed the Seyfert nucleus.
