SIMBAD references

SCUBA 450 and 850µm maps of the Antennae Galaxy resolve the nuclei of NGC4038/39 and two prominent regions in the overlap area of the galaxy disks. They coincide excellently with bright emission peaks seen on 15µm, 6cm and CO maps. ISOPHOT 60 and 100µm maps reveal that the overlap area and the NGC4038 nucleus are also responsible for the bulk of the far-infrared emission. In addition to the prominent emission from dust at a temperature of about 30K, typical for active starburst galaxies, cold dust at temperatures below 20K is found like in quiescent galaxies and dense cloud complexes. Thus, the observations suggest a common phenomenon for merging galaxies: besides the warm dust heated by active starbursts they possess simultaneously dense concentrations of cold dust which are presumably in a pre-starburst phase. The dust mass in the two overlap region knots is about 10⁷M_☉ which comprises a considerable fraction of the typical dust content of a whole spiral galaxy. Such a high concentration could be explained by an initial inelastic collision of clouds which loose their angular momentum and serve as concentrating kernels into which the other clouds rotating in the disks are running. The two submm knots seem to comprise independent kernels, since they are too far separated to be mutually triggered.