Carbon monoxide in an extremely metal-poor galaxy.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 27934880.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms13789 and PMC identifier 5155163.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
Extremely metal-poor galaxies with metallicity below 10% of the solar value in the local universe are the best analogues to investigating the interstellar medium at a quasi-primitive environment in the early universe. In spite of the ongoing formation of stars in these galaxies, the presence of molecular gas (which is known to provide the material reservoir for star formation in galaxies such as our Milky Way) remains unclear. Here we report the detection of carbon monoxide (CO), the primary tracer of molecular gas, in a galaxy with 7% solar metallicity, with additional detections in two galaxies at higher metallicities. Such detections offer direct evidence for the existence of molecular gas in these galaxies that contain few metals. Using archived infrared data, it is shown that the molecular gas mass per CO luminosity at extremely low metallicity is approximately one-thousand times the Milky Way value.