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Register a new userThe Survey of Water and Ammonia in the Galactic Center (SWAG): Molecular Cloud Evolution in the Central Molecular Zone
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The Survey of Water and Ammonia in the Galactic Center (SWAG) covers the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) of the Milky Way at frequencies between 21.2 and 25.4 GHz obtained at the Australia Telescope Compact Array at $sim 0.9$ pc spatial and $sim 2.0$ km s$^{-1}$ spectral resolution. In this paper, we present data on the inner $sim 250$ pc ($1.4^circ$) between Sgr C and Sgr B2. We focus on the hyperfine structure of the metastable ammonia inversion lines (J,K) = (1,1) - (6,6) to derive column density, kinematics, opacity and kinetic gas temperature. In the CMZ molecular clouds, we find typical line widths of $8-16$ km s$^{-1}$ and extended regions of optically thick ($tau > 1$) emission. Two components in kinetic temperature are detected at $25-50$ K and $60-100$ K, both being significantly hotter than dust temperatures throughout the CMZ. We discuss the physical state of the CMZ gas as traced by ammonia in the context of the orbital model by Kruijssen et al. (2015) that interprets the observed distribution as a stream of molecular clouds following an open eccentric orbit. This allows us to statistically investigate the time dependencies of gas temperature, column density and line width. We find heating rates between $sim 50$ and $sim 100$ K Myr$^{-1}$ along the stream orbit. No strong signs of time dependence are found for column density or line width. These quantities are likely dominated by cloud-to-cloud variations. Our results qualitatively match the predictions of the current model of tidal triggering of cloud collapse, orbital kinematics and the observation of an evolutionary sequence of increasing star formation activity with orbital phase.
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SWAG (Survey of Water and Ammonia in the Galactic Center) is a multi-line interferometric survey toward the Center of the Milky Way conducted with the Australia Telescope Compact Array. The survey region spans the entire ~400pc Central Molecular Zone and comprises ~42 spectral lines at pc spatial and sub-km/s spectral resolution. In addition, we deeply map continuum intensity, spectral index, and polarization at the frequencies where synchrotron, free-free, and thermal dust sources emit. The observed spectral lines include many transitions of ammonia, which we use to construct maps of molecular gas temperature, opacity and gas formation temperature (see poster by Nico Krieger et al., this volume). Water masers pinpoint the sites of active star formation and other lines are good tracers for density, radiation field, shocks, and ionization. This extremely rich survey forms a perfect basis to construct maps of the physical parameters of the gas in this extreme environment.
The Galactic Center contains large amounts of molecular and ionized gas as well as a plethora of energetic objects. Water masers are an extinction-insensitive probe for star formation and thus ideal for studies of star formation stages in this highly obscured region. With the Australia Telescope Compact Array, we observed 22 GHz water masers in the entire Central Molecular Zone with sub-parsec resolution as part of the large SWAG survey: ``Survey of Water and Ammonia in the Galactic Center. We detect of order 600 22 GHz masers with isotropic luminosities down to ~10^-7 Lo. Masers with luminosities of >~10^-6 Lo are likely associated with young stellar objects. They appear to be close to molecular gas streamers and may be due to star formation events that are triggered at pericenter passages near Sgr A*. Weaker masers are more widely distributed and frequently show double line features, a tell-tale sign for an origin in evolved star envelopes.
We present the first systematic study of the density structure of clouds found in a complete sample covering all major molecular clouds in the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ; inner $sim{}200~rm{}pc$) of the Milky Way. This is made possible by using data from the Galactic Center Molecular Cloud Survey (GCMS), the first study resolving all major molecular clouds in the CMZ at interferometer angular resolution. We find that many CMZ molecular clouds have unusually shallow density gradients compared to regions elsewhere in the Milky Way. This is possibly a consequence of weak gravitational binding of the clouds. The resulting relative absence of dense gas on spatial scales $sim{}0.1~rm{}pc$ is probably one of the reasons why star formation (SF) in dense gas of the CMZ is suppressed by a factor $sim{}10$, compared to solar neighborhood clouds. Another factor suppressing star formation are the high SF density thresholds that likely result from the observed gas kinematics. Further, it is possible but not certain that the star formation activity and the cloud density structure evolve systematically as clouds orbit the CMZ.
We present maps of a large number of dense molecular gas tracers across the Central Molecular Zone of our Galaxy. The data were taken with the CSIRO/CASS Mopra telescope in Large Projects in the 1.3cm, 7mm, and 3mm wavelength regimes. Here, we focus on the brightness of the shock tracers SiO and HNCO, molecules that are liberated from dust grains under strong (SiO) and weak (HNCO) shocks. The shocks may have occurred when the gas enters the bar regions and the shock differences could be due to differences in the moving cloud mass. Based on tracers of ionizing photons, it is unlikely that the morphological differences are due to selective photo-dissociation of the molecules. We also observe direct heating of molecular gas in strongly shocked zones, with a high SiO/HNCO ratios, where temperatures are determined from the transitions of ammonia. Strong shocks appear to be the most efficient heating source of molecular gas, apart from high energy emission emitted by the central supermassive black hole Sgr A* and the processes within the extreme star formation region Sgr B2.
The Galactic Center 50 km s$^{-1}$ Molecular Cloud (50MC) is the most remarkable molecular cloud in the Sagittarius A region. This cloud is a candidate for the massive star formation induced by cloud-cloud collision (CCC) with a collision velocity of $sim30rm~km~s^{-1}$ that is estimated from the velocity dispersion. We observed the whole of the 50MC with a high angular resolution ($sim2.0times1.4$) in ALMA cycle 1 in the H$^{13}$CO$^+~J=1-0$ and ${rm C^{34}S}~J=2-1$ emission lines. We identified 241 and 129 bound cores with a virial parameter of less than 2, which are thought to be gravitationally bound, in the H$^{13}$CO$^+$ and ${rm C^{34}S}$ maps using the clumpfind algorithm, respectively. In the CCC region, the bound ${rm H^{13}CO^+}$ and ${rm C^{34}S}$ cores are 119 and 82, whose masses are $68~%$ and $76~%$ of those in the whole 50MC, respectively. The distribution of the core number and column densities in the CCC are biased to larger densities than those in the non-CCC region. The distributions indicate that the CCC compresses the molecular gas and increases the number of the dense bound cores. Additionally, the massive bound cores with masses of $>3000~M_{odot}$ exist only in the CCC region, although the slope of the core mass function (CMF) in the CCC region is not different from that in the non-CCC region. We conclude that the compression by the CCC efficiently formed massive bound cores even if the slope of the CMF is not changed so much by the CCC.
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