AAS 199th meeting, Washington, DC, January 2002
Session 72. Properties and Structure of Extragalactic Systems
Oral, Tuesday, January 8, 2002, 10:00-11:30am, Georgetown East

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[72.06] The Molecular Gas Distribution in two Polar Ring Galaxies

E. Schinnerer, N.Z. Scoville (Caltech)

Polar ring galaxies are peculiar objects with rings of ~ 10 to 25~kpc diameter which are oriented almost perpendicular to the main stellar disk. Recently a violent formation process was suggested: a galaxy merger between two disk galaxies. In order to test this scenario, we mapped the molecular gas distribution in two representative polar ring galaxies (NGC~660 and NGC~2685) using the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) millimeter array. NGC~660 is the only late-type galaxy among the known polar ring galaxies. Our recent observations of the molecular gas content suggest the presence of a molecular gas spiral out to 5.5~kpc in the disk. NGC~2685 which is one of the few kinematically confirmed polar ring galaxies shows CO line emission associated with the HII regions in the polar ring but no line emission is detected in the host S0 disk.


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