VERTICO IV: Environmental Effects on the Gas Distribution and Star Formation Efficiency of Virgo Cluster Spirals

Vicente Villanueva; Alberto D. Bolatto; Stuart Vogel; Tobias Brown; Christine D. Wilson; Nikki Zabel; Sara Ellison; Adam R. H. Stevens; Maria Jesus Jimenez Donaire; Kristine Spekkens; Mallory Thorp; Timothy A. Davis; Laura C. Parker; Ian D. Roberts; Dhruv Bisaria; Alessandro Boselli; Barbara Catinella; Aeree Chung; Luca Cortese; Bumhyun Lee; Adam Watts

doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac9d3c

paper

VERTICO IV: Environmental Effects on the Gas Distribution and Star Formation Efficiency of Virgo Cluster Spirals

arXiv:2210.05381 · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac9d3c

Abstract

We measure the molecular-to-atomic gas ratio, $R_{mol}$ , and the star formation rate (SFR) per unit molecular gas mass, SFE $_{mol}$ , in 38 nearby galaxies selected from the Virgo Environment Traced in CO (VERTICO) survey. We determine their scale-lengths for the molecular and stellar components and find a roughly 3:5 ratio between them compared to $\sim$ 1:1 in field galaxies, indicating that the CO emission is more centrally concentrated than the stars. We compute $R_{mol}$ as a function of different physical quantities. While the spatially-resolved $R_{mol}$ on average decreases with increasing radius, we find that the mean molecular-to-atomic gas ratio within the stellar effective radius $R_{e}$ , $R_{mol} (r < R_{e})$ , shows a systematic increase with the level of H $_{I}$ , truncation and/or asymmetry (H $_{I}$ perturbation). Analysis of the molecular- and the atomic-to-stellar mass ratios within $R_{e}$ , $R_{⋆}^{mol} (r < R_{e})$ and $R_{⋆}^{atom} (r < R_{e})$ , shows that VERTICO galaxies have increasingly lower $R_{⋆}^{atom} (r < R_{e})$ for larger levels of H $_{I}$ perturbation (compared to field galaxies matched in stellar mass), but no significant change in $R_{⋆}^{mol} (r < R_{e})$ . We also measure a clear systematic decrease of the SFE $_{mol}$ within $R_{e}$ , SFE $_{mol} (r < R_{e})$ , with increasingly perturbed H $_{I}$ . Therefore, compared to galaxies from the field, VERTICO galaxies are more compact in CO emission in relation to their stellar distribution, but increasingly perturbed atomic gas increases their $R_{mol}$ and decreases the efficiency with which their molecular gas forms stars. (abridged)

VERTICO IV: Environmental Effects on the Gas Distribution and Star Formation Efficiency of Virgo Cluster Spirals

Abstract

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