As fuel feeding supermassive black hole and star formation, cold molecular gas is the key to many fundamental processes in galaxy evolution. In the last decade and especially with the advent of Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), it has become feasible to spatially resolve giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in a large number and a wide variety of galaxies. Here, I summarise my work as part of the mm-Wave Interferometric Survey of Dark Object Masses (WISDOM), a high-resolution (~50 pc) survey of molecular gas in galaxy nuclei. First, I will discuss the molecular gas morphology and kinematics in three megamaser (Seyfert-II) galaxies at intermediate resolution (≈100 pc). Then, I talk about giant molecular clouds (resolution≈20 pc) and star formation in an S0 galaxy, NGC1387. It surprisingly has late-type-like GMC properties (e.g. perfect Virialisation) together with early-type-like low star formation efficiency. To constrain the physical drivers of GMC properties and star formation, I discuss these results in light of models describing the impact of shear and cloud-cloud collisions. Finally, I briefly introduce ongoing work trying to understand the (mis-)alignment between GMC spin and disc kinematics.
BIO
Fuheng Liang is a PhD student at the University of Oxford since 2020 (supervised by Prof. Martin Bureau) and is also a team member of the mm-Wave Interferometric Survey of Dark Object Masses (WISDOM). Before this, he obtained his Bachelor's (2013-2017; awarded Chi-Sun Yeh Prize) and Master's (2017-2020) degrees at Tsinghua University (supervised by Prof. Cheng Li). His research interests include cold molecular gas, star formation and quenching, the initial mass function, atomic hydrogen in galaxies, chemical enrichment of the interstellar medium, etc.
