Project G
Star formation in the extreme
Ashley Barnes & Katharina Immer
One of the major unanswered questions in astronomy is: how do stars form, and have they always formed in the same way? Investigating this question has pushed us to the most extreme and violent environments, which are similar to those at much earlier times in the universe. In this project, we invite you to join us in the study of star formation within the closest of such an extreme environment - the centre of the Milky Way.
We have recently acquired a large set of state-of-the-art observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA; operated by ESO) under the project “ACES - The ALMA Central Molecular Zone Exploration Survey“. These observations target the central few hundred parsecs of the centre of our galaxy, referred to as the central molecular zone (or “CMZ”) due to its massive reservoir of dense molecular gas. Along with this, the CMZ also contains a large number of astronomical exotics such as neutron stars, pulsars, black holes, and, of course, the recently imaged supermassive black hole at the heart of the Galaxy. The observations will help us study the kinematic, chemistry, and physical properties of the star-forming regions within the CMZ, and understand the effect of this extreme environment on the star formation process.
In this project, we invite you to join our international collaboration, and be exposed to wider ongoing research on the Galactic Centre. The project work involves conducting some hands-on reduction of the raw data from the telescope, as well as conducting cutting-edge science with a subset of the final reduced dataset. In all, this contained project will give you broad exposure to what life in astronomy as part of a large collaboration is like on a day-to-day basis.