Resolution and Kinematics of Molecular Gas Surrounding the Cloverleaf Quasar at z = 2.6 Using the Gravitational Lens

摘要

Gravitational lenses have long been advertised as primitive telescopes, capable of magnifying cosmologically distant sources. In this Letter we present new, 0".9 resolution CO (76) observations of the z = 2.56 Cloverleaf quasar (H1413+117) and spatially resolved images. By modeling the gravitational lens, we infer a size scale of 0".3 (1 kpc) for the molecular gas structure surrounding the quasar, and the gas has a kinematic structure roughly consistent with a rotating disk.