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Session 78 - Seyfert Galaxies.
Display session, Friday, January 09
Exhibit Hall,
We have made ^12CO observations at sub-arcsecond spatial resolution in nearby Seyfert galaxies with the IRAM interferometer on the Plateau de Bure, France. In this poster, we show that, in several sources, the gas is distributed in ring-like structures located within the central few hundred parsecs of the nucleus. These ringlike structures likely represent the locations of resonances where gas piles up as it is channeled in to fuel the active nucleus, and may provide evidence for the "nested bar" scenario for fueling active nuclei (e.g. Shlosman, Frank, and Begelman, 1989, Nature, 338, 45). We highlight results from the archetypal Seyfert 2 galaxy, NGC 1068, and the Seyfert 1 galaxies NGC 7469 and NGC 3227. The main goals of our work are to understand the kinematics of the gas in order to get accurate estimates of the enclosed mass in the circumnuclear regions, and (2) to identify the important mechanisms which are transporting the molecular fuel to feed the powerful AGN and starbursts. An important aspect of our work is that, with the high spatial resolution we can now estimate the properties of the molecular gas associated with narrow line regions and circumnuclear starbursts with little contamination frm the more quiescent disk molecular gas.
