ALMA IMAGING OF THE CO (6-5) LINE EMISSION IN NGC 7130

In this paper, we report our high-resolution (0.″20 × 0.″14 or ∼70 × 49 pc) observations of the CO(6-5) line emission, which probes warm and dense molecular gas, and the 434 μ m dust continuum in the nuclear region of NGC 7130, obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). The CO line and dust continuum fluxes detected in our ALMA observations are 1230 ± 74 Jy km s −1 and 814 ± 52 mJy, respectively, which account for 100% and 51% of their total fluxes. We find that the CO(6-5) and dust emissions are generally spatially correlated, but their brightest peaks show an offset of ∼70 pc, suggesting that the gas and dust emissions may start decoupling at this physical scale. The brightest peak of the CO(6-5) emission does not spatially correspond to the radio continuum peak, which is likely dominated by an active galactic nucleus (AGN). This, together with our additional quantitative analysis, suggests that the heating contribution of the AGN to the CO(6-5) emission in NGC 7130 is negligible. The CO(6-5) and the extinction-corrected Pa- α maps display striking differences, suggestive of either a breakdown of the correlation between warm dense gas and star formation at linear scales of