H2/CO Conversion Factor for M31 Molecular Clouds

Abstract

The conversion factor from the CO line intensity to column density of molecular hydrogen, X = NH2/ICO is one of the most important parameters in mm-wave study of galaxies and their molecular gas (e.g., Maloney 1990). Although the same value as that obtained for our Galactic clouds (e.g. Sanders et al. 1984; Bloemen et al. 1985) has been widely applied to galaxies, it is far from trivial that the conversion factor is universal among various types of galaxies. There have been few attempts to derive the value for galaxies, and the value is still controversial if it is applicable to other galaxies or not: Approximately the same value as that for the Galaxy has been derived for M33 (Wilson and Scoville 1990, 1992), while an order of magnitude larger value is obtained for the LMC and SMC (Cohen et al. 1988; Rubin et al. 1991).In order to obtain the conversion factor in nearby galaxies, in which individual molecular clouds can be resolved, we are conducting CO-line mapping of M31. In this paper we report a preliminary results from mapping of a north-eastern spiral arm of M31 in the 12CO(J =1 − 0) line emission using the NMA.