MOLECULAR GAS IN ELLIPTICAL GALAXIES: DISTRIBUTION AND KINEMATICS

I present interferometric images (700 resolution) of CO emission in five elliptical galaxies and nondetec-tions in two others. These data double the number of elliptical galaxies whose CO emission has been fully mapped. The sample galaxies have 108 to 5 109 M of molecular gas distributed in mostly symmetric rotat-ing disks with diameters of 2–12 kpc. Four out of the five molecular disks show remarkable alignment with the optical major axes of their host galaxies. The molecular masses are a few percent of the total dynamical masses that are implied if the gas is on circular orbits. If the molecular gas forms stars, it will make rotation-ally supported stellar disks that will be very similar in character to the stellar disks now known to be present in many ellipticals. Comparison of stellar kinematics to gas kinematics in NGC 4476 implies that the molecu-lar gas did not come from internal stellar mass loss because the specific angular momentum of the gas is about 3 times larger than that of the stars