Astro Seminar
An extreme star forming environment at the centre of our Galaxy: understanding its complexity with simulations
Speaker: Robin Tress (Lausanne)
Date: Wednesday 18 March 2026
Time: 14:00
Venue: N3.28
The Galactic Centre is extreme in many ways. Gas inflows driven by the Galactic Bar pile up forming a dense structure called the Central Molecular Zone, concentrating 3-10% of the molecular gas of our Galaxy in a region just a few hundred parsec in diameter. Here, star formation proceeds in a unique environment. High surface densities, complex and turbulent gas motions, frequent cloud collisions as well as violent feedback events and strong magnetic fields make this an ideal testbed to stress-test our understanding of how stars form. Orbital timescales as well as bar-driven inflow events occur on timescales comparable to molecular cloud lifetimes. As a result, here more than anywhere else small-scale star formation physics tightly couples to large-scale galactic dynamics. This results in young stars quickly decoupling from their parental gas cloud, changing how their feedback is able to regulate star formation. We dissect all this complexity with detailed and targeted radiation-MHD simulations of increasing sophistication in order to ultimately understand how each of these ingredients impact the interstellar medium in the region, regulate star formation and drive further inflows feeding the central supermassive black hole.