Moleculars

Research area

Molecular gas is the requisite fuel of star forming activity and supermassive black hole accretion. The CO line emission provides a direct tracer of the molecular gas component from the AGN-star forming systems at low and high redshifts. We are pursuing millimeter and radio observations using the large interferometer arrays, such as ALMA, NOEMA, and VLA, etc, to study the molecular CO emission from the distant quasar host galaxies, to probe the mass, distribution, and kinematics of the molecular gas.

The molecular, atomic, and ionized gas components in these young quasar host galaxies, trace the star formation region, probing the physical condition and excitation of the ISM powered by the AGN and star forming activity and constraining the dynamical mass of the spheroidal quasar hosts at their early evolutionary stage.

Figure 1. Molecular CO (2-1), (6-5), and [C II] detection from the quasar SDSS J0100+2802 at z=6.3258 (Wang et al. 2016).