Graduate student Jennifer Wallace’s paper on molecular filaments observed towards the Sagittarius E star forming region has been published in ApJ! Congratulations, Jen! 🥳🤩

The Sgr E region is located near the dynamic intersection between the Galaxy’s Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) and the ‘far dust lane’, a stream of inflowing gas that helps transport material from the Galactic disk towards the CMZ. Using high-resolution CO spectral line observations from ALMA, Wallace et al. found multiple filaments in the Sgr E region that were well-aligned with the Galactic plane. In this paper, she investigates the physical properties of two prominent filaments observed in the data, and speculates on how their current alignment and elongated appearance may have been caused by gas being ‘stretched’ by the Galactic bar potential as it traveled the length of the dust lane. These superb ALMA observations certainly show us how investigating structures on parsec scales can still give us a glimpse of the large-scale processes at work.

Figure 5 from the paper shows channel maps of the two prominent filaments in a narrow line of sight velocity range about their observed central velocities. The orange and blue contours indicate estimated boundaries for the filaments.