Emission from extragalactic star forming gas

We adopted a Galactic model of massive star forming regions (Viti & Williams 1999; Viti et al. 2001) to predict the possible range of chemical abundances of more than 200 species in extragalactic star forming regions. We find that hot core molecules should be detectable in external active galaxies out to high redshift. We present a summary of this study as well as observations of typical tracers of extragalactic hot cores to confirm the modelling work. We detected for the first time the CS(7-6) line in the center of M 82 and we provide the first detection of CS taken in the Antennae (NGC 4038)