Welcome to the webpage of the 3-D CMZ project. This site is intended as a collective resource for relevant papers, data products, and code associated with the project.
A top-down view of the Milky Way’s Central Molecular Zone
The central 300 pc of the Milky Way, the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ), has extreme physical properties not found elsewhere in our Galaxy. A comprehensive 3-D model of the central 300 pc of the (CMZ) is fundamentally important to understanding energy cycles in galactic nuclei, and answering questions across multiple fields of astrophysics: e.g. how processes such as star formation vary with environment, constraining limits on dark matter annihilation and diffuse gamma ray emission from Fermi Space Telescope measurements, and helping to place our galaxy in the context of the local universe. We present a series of papers and data products, providing detailed analysis of the Milky Way’s CMZ for a comprehensive top-down model of the CMZ.
3-D CMZ papers
Paper I: Battersby et al. (accepted to ApJ): This paper presents an overview of far-IR dust continuum of the inner 40° of the Milky Way using Herschel, with a particular focus on the CMZ. We create and publicly release complete column density and dust temperature maps of the CMZ, and report global properties.
Paper II: Battersby et al. (accepted to ApJ): In this paper, we perform dendrogram analysis on the column density map to create a multi-scale hierarchical catalog of dense structures in the CMZ. We report the physical properties (molecular gas column density, N (H2), Tdust, mass, radius), kinematic properties (HNCO, HCN, and HC3N simple moment analysis), luminosity and star formation rates (SFRs) for each structure in the catalog. We place these CMZ structures in a broader context by comparing their properties with those of regions within the Milky Way disk as well as distant galaxies.
Paper III: Walker et al. (accepted to ApJ): Presents a follow-up study to Papers I and II, adding further constraints to the dendrogram analysis for the catalog. We present the updated catalog, as well as release data products such as masks corresponding to molecular clouds identified by the dendrogram leaves. The masks are used in combination with the HiGAL column density map as well as archival molecular line data from the APEX and MOPRA CMZ surveys, to analyse the global kineamtic properties of the clouds. Radio continuum emission and molecular line absorption from GBT and ATCA CMZ surveys are used for near/far disambiguation of molecular clouds in the CMZ.
Paper IV: Lipman et al. (accepted to ApJ): Investigates the use of MIR dust extinction techniques for near/far diambiguation using Spitzer 8µm data, the HiGAL column density map from Paper I, and cloud catalog from Paper III. We explore the application of typical 8µm dust exctinction column density methods in the high density CMZ. We then present three new dust extinction methods for near/far diambiguation: a calculated 70µm extinction column density, a flux ratio, and flux difference. We compare the three new methods in this paper, as well as the molecular line absorption results from Paper III, to determine near/far likelihoods for all clouds in the catalog and compare with current 3-D orbital models of the CMZ.
See the Results!
This web app was created by Daniel Walker to display four models of the 3-D geometry of the CMZ overlaid with the results from Papers III and IV. Use the embedded app below, or visit This Link (Note: this app works best on Google Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge).
Data Products
All data products can be found on the public Harvard DataVerse We select several key products we’d like to highlight, linked below:
Integrated column density map from Paper I
Dust temperature map from Paper I
Hierarchical structure catalog properties (Tables 1-4) from Paper II
Synthesized methods and results table from Paper IV
8µm Flux Ratio map from Paper IV
8µm Flux Difference map from Paper IV
Individually masked 70µm Correlation Coefficient maps from Paper IV can be found here
Relevant Code
Relevant code associated with each paper in the series can be found here: GitHub: 3-D CMZ Analysis Code
Links to Archival Data Used
See the Central Molecular Zone Data Sets repository for a fuller list of available CMZ datasets
World Wide Telescope Tour
In addition to the Data Products linked above, we invite you to visit a guided World Wide Telescope tour of the CMZ. Created by Danya Alboslani with original script written by another UConn undergraduate student. Editing assistance from Dr. Cara Battersby, Dani Lipman, and Dr. Daniel Walker
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation through Award Nos. 1816715, 2206510, and CAREER 2145689