Colloq Abstract - Hatchfield
December 16, 2022
11:00am Mountain
H. Perry Hatchfield (Univ. of Connecticut)
Title
Chaos in the Core: Exploring the Turbulent Evolution of the Milky Way's Galactic Center
Abstract
The Milky Way’s Galactic Center provides a unique opportunity to study star formation in an extreme dynamical environment. The innermost few hundred parsecs of the Galaxy contain an enormous reservoir of dense molecular gas known as the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ), but despite having copious fuel to form stars, its recent star formation rate is at least an order of magnitude lower than expected. The intensity and variety of physical mechanisms governing the CMZ’s interstellar medium presents a challenge in pinning down the relationship between environment and cloud evolution, a challenge that must be answered by highly complete surveys across different wavelengths and carefully designed simulations covering a wide range of physical scales. I will present new results from the CMZoom survey, including the most complete to-date catalog of incipient high-mass star formation in the CMZ. I will present our dynamically-motivated hydrodynamical simulations of the CMZ, using which we explore its unusual gas dynamics and constrain the mass inflow rate towards the Galactic Center. These results highlight the importance of the large-scale dynamical environment on the formation of stars and connect the dearth of star formation in the CMZ to its evolutionary history.
