Feeding cosmic star formation: Exploring high-redshift molecular gas with CO intensity mapping

Understand

The study of molecular gas is crucial for understanding star formation, feedback, and the broader ecosystem of a galaxy as a whole.

• However, we have limited understanding of its physics and distribution in all but the nearest galaxies.
• We present a new technique for studying the composition and distribution of molecular gas in high-redshift galaxies inaccessible to existing methods.
• Our proposed approach is an extension of carbon monoxide intensity mapping methods, which have garnered significant experimental interest in recent years.