THE MOLECULAR GAS DENSITY IN GALAXY CENTERS AND HOW IT CONNECTS TO BULGES

In this paper we present gas density, star formation rate (SFR), stellar masses, and bulge-disk decompositions for a sample of 60 galaxies. Our sample is the combined sample of the BIMA SONG, CARMA STING, and PdBI NUGA surveys. We study the effect of using CO-to-H2 conversion factors that depend on the CO surface brightness, and also that of correcting SFRs for diffuse emission from old stellar populations. We estimate that SFRs in bulges are typically lower by 20% when correcting for diffuse emission. Using the surface brightness dependent conversion factor, we find that over half of the galaxies in our sample have Σmol > 100 M ⊙ pc-2. Though our sample is not complete in any sense, our results are enough to rule out the assumption that bulges are uniformly gas-poor systems. We find a trend between gas density of bulges and bulge S.