CMZoom: Survey Overview and First Data Release
Cara Battersby, Eric Keto, Daniel Walker, Ashley Barnes, Daniel, Callanan, Adam Ginsburg, H Perry Hatchfield, Jonathan Henshaw, Jens, Kauffmann, J. M. Diederik Kruijssen, Steven N. Longmore, Xing Lu, Elisabeth, A. C. Mills, Thushara Pillai, Qizhou Zhang, John Bally

TL;DR
The CMZoom survey provides the first high-resolution, blind mapping of the Central Molecular Zone, revealing a surprising deficit of compact dense gas structures despite high densities, which impacts star formation understanding.
Contribution
This paper introduces the CMZoom survey and its first data release, highlighting the unexpected low dense gas fraction in the CMZ compared to Galactic disk clouds.
Findings
CMZoom detected many complex substructures but with low compact dense gas fraction.
CMZ clouds have a substantially lower dense gas fraction than Galactic disk clouds.
The low dense gas fraction may explain the suppressed star formation in the CMZ.
Abstract
We present an overview of the CMZoom survey and its first data release. CMZoom is the first blind, high-resolution survey of the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ; the inner 500 pc of the Milky Way) at wavelengths sensitive to the pre-cursors of high-mass stars. CMZoom is a 500-hour Large Program on the Submillimeter Array (SMA) that mapped at 1.3 mm all of the gas and dust in the CMZ above a molecular hydrogen column density of 10^23 cm^-2 at a resolution of ~3" (0.1 pc). In this paper, we focus on the 1.3 mm dust continuum and its data release, but also describe CMZoom spectral line data which will be released in a forthcoming publication. While CMZoom detected many regions with rich and complex substructure, its key result is an overall deficit in compact substructures on 0.1 - 2 pc scales (the compact dense gas fraction: CDGF). In comparison with clouds in the Galactic disk, the CDGF in…
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