From the UConn Astronomy meeting room whiteboard (left) to ApJ letters (right) in just over a year! Read all about the distribution of star formation and gas in Galaxy Centers from cosmological zoom-in simulations. We find that there are two classes of centers: bursty and smooth. The bursty centers are the only ones able to simultaneously match the Milky Way’s CMZ star formation rate and gas density, supporting the idea that star formation in the CMZ may be bursty. This might help to explain the unexpectedly low star formation rate of our Galaxy’s Center at the current time.

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