Properties of giant molecular clouds in the strongly barred galaxy NGC 1300

Abstract

ABSTRACT Star formation activity depends on galactic-scale environments. To understand the variations in star formation activity, comparing the properties of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) among environments with different star formation efficiency (SFE) is necessary. We thus focus on a strongly barred galaxy to investigate the impact of the galactic environment on the GMC properties, because the SFE is clearly lower in bar regions than in arm regions. In this paper, we present the 12CO(1 − 0) observations towards the western bar, arm, and bar-end regions of the strongly barred galaxy NGC 1300 with ALMA 12-m array at a high angular resolution of ∼40 pc. We detected GMCs associated with the dark lanes not only in the arm and bar-end regions but also in the bar region, where massive star formation is not seen. Using the CPROPS algorithm, we identified and characterized 233 GMCs across the observed regions. Based on the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, we find that there is virtually no significant variations in GMC properties (e.g. radius, velocity dispersion, molecular gas mass, and virial parameter) among the bar, arm, and bar-end region. These results suggest that systematic differences in the physical properties of the GMCs are not the cause for SFE differences with environments, and that there should be other mechanisms which control the SFE of the GMCs such as fast cloud–cloud collisions in NGC 1300.