The Detection Rate of Molecular Gas in Elliptical Galaxies: Constraints on Galaxy Formation Theories

Abstract

In order to constrain parameters in galaxy formation theories, especially those for a star formation process, we investigate cold gas in elliptical galaxies. We calculate the detection rate of cold gas in them using a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation and compare it with observations. We show that the model with a long star formation time-scale (~20 Gyr) is inconsistent with observations. Thus, some mechanisms of reducing the mass of interstellar medium, such as the consumption of molecular gas by star formation and/or reheating from supernovae, are certainly effective in galaxies. Our model predicts that star formation induced when galaxies in a halo collide each other reduces the cold gas left until the present. However, we find that the reduction through random collisions of satellite (non-central) galaxies in mean free time-scale in a halo is not required to explain the observations. This may imply that the collisions and mergers between satellite galaxies do not occur so often in clusters or that they do not stimulate the star formation activity as much as the simple collision model we adopted. For cD galaxies, the predicted detection rate of cold gas is consistent with observations as long as the transformation of hot gas into cold gas is prevented in halos whose circular velocities are larger than 500 km s^-1. Moreover, we find that the cold gas brought into cDs through captures of gas-rich galaxies is little. We also show that the fraction of galaxies with observable cold gas should be small for cluster ellipticals in comparison with that for field ellipticals.