Our collaborative NSF proposal (led by Prof. Betsy Mills at KU and co-PIed with Adam Ginsburg at UF, Qizhou Zhang at SAO, and John Bally at Colorado) to fund research studying gas flows in our Galaxy’s Center using the ACES survey (more below!) has been awarded! 🥳🥰

With the ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey, an approved ALMA large program to survey the entire Milky Way Central Molecular Zone, we are poised to make the first comprehensive model of mass flows in a galaxy nucleus. We will conduct a complete census of the mass in molecular gas and protostars spanning four orders of magnitude in size scale and characterize the associated gas kinematics with more than a dozen molecular tracers. This project will lead to advances in our understanding of the physics that drives mass flows and will produce the definitive measurements of the rates of inflow, outflow, star formation, and accretion toward the central supermassive black hole. This team comprises the North American Co-PIs of the ACES collaboration, with expertise on multiwavelength observations and simulations of galaxy centers, as well as gas kinematics, star formation, gas chemistry, and fragmentation.

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