Molecular Gas and Star Formation Properties in Early Stage Mergers: SMA CO(2-1) Observations of the LIRGs NGC 3110 and NGC 232

We thank the referee for the careful reading and valuable suggestions that helped to improve this paper substantially. This research made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We acknowledge the usage of the HyperLeda database. (http://leda.univ-lyon1.fr). We thank Dr. T. Hattori and Dr. H. Schmitt for kindly providing Ha maps used in this paper to derive the SF laws. D.E. was supported by a Marie Curie International Fellowship within the Sixth European Community Framework Programme (MOIF-CT-2006-40298). S.V. acknowledges support by the research projects AYA2014-53506-P and AYA2017-84897-P from the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, from the European Regional Development Funds (FEDER) and the Junta de Andalucia (Spain) grants FQM108. T.S. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 694343). L.V.M. acknowledges support from the grant AYA2015-65973-C3-1-R (MINECO/FEDER, UE). S. Matsushita is supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan, MOST 106-2112-M-001-011 and 107-2119-M-001-020. M.A.F. is grateful for financial support from the CONICYT Astronomy Program CAS-CONICYT project No. CAS17002, sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), through a grant to the CAS South America Center for Astronomy (CASSACA) in Santiago, Chile. This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python. (http://www.python.org) package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013; The Astropy Collaboration et al. 2018); ipython (Perez & Granger 2007); matplotlib (Hunter 2007); APLpy, an opensource plotting package for Python (Robitaille & Bressert 2012) and NumPy (Van Der Walt et al. 2011). We utilized the pynbody python package (Pontzen et al. 2013) for post-processing and analyzing of the tipsy files created by gasoline2. Special thanks to the authors of gasoline2 (Wadsley et al. 2017) for providing the numerical code used to perform the simulations. Part of this work was achieved using the grant of Visiting Scholars Program supported by the Research Coordination Committee, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS). D. E. was supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant No. JP 17K14254.