Starts With A Bang podcast #133 – The Milky Way’s center

Here in our Universe, there are all sorts of places where stars are actively forming right now. Our galaxy is going through a relatively quiet phase at present as far as star-formation is concerned, but that rate was much higher in the past: perhaps 30 (or more) times higher than what it is today. If we want to understand what our galaxy was like earlier on, we have two ways to go about it: look farther away, which has the disadvantage that we can’t really observe those places in such great detail, or look to the galactic center, which has the highest star-formation rate of anyplace in the Milky Way.

The central molecular zone, in particular, is where the greatest amount of activity is: just two degrees across and half a degree high, centered on our supermassive black hole some 26,000 light-years away. This region was obscure to humanity for nearly all of cosmic history: blocked by all of the intervening neutral matter, and by cosmic dust in particular, that optical light simply can’t penetrate. But in the 20th and 21st centuries, with the advent of multiwavelength astronomy, the secrets of the galactic center are finally being revealed as never before.

I’m so pleased to get to speak with Prof. Cara Battersby of the University of Connecticut for this wonderful episode of the Starts With A Bang podcast. From space telescopes to technosignatures and a whole lot more that you might not have considered, the central molecular zone, or CMZ for short, is one of the most scientifically interesting regions in all of known space. Come find out what makes it so fascinating on this all-new episode!

This article is featured on Big Think.