Molecular Gas in Major Mergers Hosting Dual and Single AGNs at <10 kpc Nuclear Separations

Abstract

Copyright and License

© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We thank the anonymous referee for providing very useful suggestions that, in our opinion, significantly improved the quality of this article. This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: ADS/JAO.ALMA#2015.1.00370.S, #2021.1.01019.S, #2022.1.01348.S, and #2023.1.01196.S. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada), MOST and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO, and NAOJ. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. M.A.J. gratefully acknowledges financial support for this research by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and US-Chile Fulbright Commission. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Fulbright Program, the Government of the United States, or the US-Chile Fulbright Commission. E.T. would like to thank the hospitality of the North American ALMA Science Center (NAASC) at NRAO during his sabbatical stay in 2022, where a significant fraction of this work was carried out. A.M.M. acknowledges support from the NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP) grant No. 80NSSC23K0750, from NSF AAG grant No. 2009416 and NSF CAREER grant No. 2239807, and from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) through the Cottrell Scholars Award CS-CSA-2024-092. We also acknowledge support from: NASA through ADAP awards NNH16CT03C (MK), 80NSSC19K1096 (F.M-S) and 80NSSC23K1529 (F.M-S), ANID through Millennium Science Initiative Program—NCN19_058 (ET), and ICN12_009 (FEB), CATA-BASAL—ACE210002 (ET, FEB) and FB210003 (ET, FEB, CR), FONDECYT Regular—1190818, 1200495, 1241005, and 1250821 (ET, FEB), FONDECYT Postdoctorado 3230653 (IMC) Fondecyt Iniciacion 11190831 (CR), the China-Chile joint research fund (CR), and the European Union’s HE ERC Starting grant No. 101040227—WINGS (GV).

Facilities

HST - Hubble Space Telescope satellite (STIS), Swift - Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission (XRT and UVOT), VLT:Yepun - Very Large Telescope (Yepun), AAVSO - American Association of Variable Star Observers International Database, CTIO:1.3 m - , CTIO:1.5 m - , CXO - Chandra X-ray Observatory satellite.