Paper detail

The Virgo High-Resolution CO Survey. II. Rotation Curves and Dynamical Mass Distributions

Based on a high-resolution CO survey of Virgo spirals with the Nobeyama Millimeter-wave Array, we determined the dynamical centers using velocity fields, and derived position-velocity diagrams (PVDs) along the major axes of the galaxies across their dynamical centers. We applied a new iteration method to derive rotation curves (RCs), which reproduce the observed PVDs. The obtained high-accuracy RCs generally show steep rise in the central 100 to 200 pc regions, followed by flat rotation in the disk. We applied a deconvolution method to calculate the surface-mass density (SMD) using the RCs based on two extreme assumptions that the mass distribution is either spherical or thin-disk shaped. Both assumptions give nearly identical results, agreeing with each other within a factor of two at any radii. The SMD distributions revealed central massive cores with peak SMD of 10^4 - 10^5 Msun pc^-2 and total mass within 200 pc radius of the order of about 10^9 Msun Correlation analysis among the derived parameters show that the central CO-line intensity is positively correlated with the central SMD, which suggests that the deeper is the gravitational potential, the higher is the molecular gas concentration in the nuclei regardless morphological types.