2014A&A...564A.121C

Observations of nearby starburst and spiral galaxies have revealed that molecular gas is the driver of star formation. However, some nearby low-metallicity dwarf galaxies are actively forming stars, but CO, the most common tracer of this reservoir, is faint, leaving us with a puzzle about how star formation proceeds in these environments. We aim to quantify the molecular gas reservoir in a subset of 6 galaxies from the Herschel Dwarf Galaxy Survey with newly acquired CO data and to link this reservoir to the observed star formation activity. We present CO(1-0), CO(2-1), and CO(3-2) observations obtained at the ATNF Mopra 22-m, APEX, and IRAM 30-m telescopes, as well as [CII] 157µm and [OI] 63µm observations obtained with the Herschel/PACS spectrometer in the 6 low-metallicity dwarf galaxies: Haro11, Mrk1089, Mrk930, NGC4861, NGC625, and UM311. We derived their molecular gas masses from several methods, including using the CO-to-H₂ conversion factor X_CO (both Galactic and metallicity-scaled values) and dust measurements. The molecular and atomic gas reservoirs were compared to the star formation activity. We also constrained the physical conditions of the molecular clouds using the non-LTE code RADEX and the spectral synthesis code Cloudy. We detect CO in 5 of the 6 galaxies, including first detections in Haro11 (Z∼0.4Z_☉), Mrk930 (0.2Z_☉), and UM311 (0.5Z_☉), but CO remains undetected in NGC4861 (0.2Z_☉). The CO luminosities are low, while [CII] is bright in these galaxies, resulting in [CII]/CO(1-0)≥10000. Our dwarf galaxies are in relatively good agreement with the Schmidt-Kennicutt relation for total gas. They show short molecular depletion timescales, even when considering metallicity-scaled X_CO factors. Those galaxies are dominated by their Higas, except Haro11, which has high star formation efficiency and is dominated by ionized and molecular gas. We determine the mass of each ISM phase in Haro11 using Cloudy and estimate an equivalent X_CO factor that is 10 times higher than the Galactic value. Overall, our results confirm the emerging picture that CO suffers from significant selective photodissociation in low-metallicity dwarf galaxies.