Invited Presentation

The SMA Legacy CMZoom survey

Author(s): Steve Longmore on behalf of the CMZoom collaboration

Presenter: Steven Longmore (Liverpool John Moores University)

The inner few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way, the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ), is our closest laboratory for understanding star formation in the extreme environments (hot, dense, turbulent gas) that once dominated the universe. I will present results from the SMA Legacy Program, CMZoom -- the first survey able to unambiguously identify the sites of high-mass star formation across all of the high column density gas with the potential to form stars in the CMZ. One of the key discoveries of the survey is that despite the huge reservoir of dense gas available for star formation, there is a surprising lack of (high-mass) compact substructures on 0.1 - 2 pc scales. The inability to form compact substructures likely plays an important role in the overall inefficiency of star formation in the Galactic Center, with implications for our understanding of star formation, feedback and the mass flows and energy cycles in the centres of galaxies. Despite this profound difference in star formation potential compared to gas in in the Galactic disk on large scales, we find that when compact structures in the CMZ do form, they have similar properties to structures on similar scales in nearby star forming regions. I will discuss the implications of this intriguing result for our understanding of star and planet formation across cosmological timescales.