Herschel-SPIRE spectroscopy of nearby Seyfert galaxies

We present the 450-1550 GHz spectra of three nearby Seyfert galaxies (NGC1068, NGC7130 and NGC7582) taken with the Herschel SPIRE FTS. For the case of NGC1068 we reconstruct the nuclear spectral line energy distribution (SLED) of the CO lines, applying nonLTE radiative transfer and a Bayesian likelihood analysis to estimate the physical properties of the molecular gas in the circumnuclear region. Groundbased observations of the low-J transitions with high (few arcsec) angular resolution are required to reconstruct the nuclear SLED avoiding contamination from colder molecular gas on larger galactic scales. We find evidence for a very warm molecular gas component with a density ~10^3.9 cm-3, similar to that found in previous works (Papadopoulos & Seaquist 1999, Usero et al. 2004, Kamenetzky et al. 2011), but with a much higher temperature (~ 550 K instead of 20-160 K). The higher-J transitions of CO are compatible with being excited in X-ray dissociation regions (XDR). However, in order to explain the entire CO SLED a comparable contribution from photodissociation regions (PDR) is required.