ACES: The Magnetic Field in Large Filaments in the Galactic Center

Pare, DM, Feng, Z-X, Hu, Y, Petkova, MA, Sullivan, J, Tress, RG, Battersby, C, Karoly, J, Lazarian, A, Lipman, D, Pan, X, Donati, M, Sormani, MC, Bally, J, Barnes, AT, Butterfield, NO, Colzi, L, Federrath, C, Garcia, P, Ginsburg, A et al (2026) ACES: The Magnetic Field in Large Filaments in the Galactic Center. The Astrophysical Journal, 1000 (1). pp. 1-19. ISSN 0004-637X

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Abstract

The Galactic center (GC) is an extreme region of the Milky Way that is host to a complex set of thermal and nonthermal structures. In particular, the GC contains high-density gas and dust that is collectively referred to as the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). In this work, we study a subset of HNCO filaments identified in Band 3 Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the GC obtained by the ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey that are comparable to high-density filaments identified in the Galactic disk. We compare the orientation of the magnetic field derived from 214 μm Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy and 850 μm James Clerk Maxwell Telescope observations with the filament orientation to determine which mechanisms dominate the formation of these filaments. We observe a large range of magnetic orientations in our observed filaments indicating the complex environments the filaments are located in. We also compare the observational results to synthetic datasets created using an MHD model of the GC. Our analysis reveals that the dominant mechanisms local to the HNCO filaments vary throughout the GC with some filaments being dominated by supersonic turbulence and others by subsonic turbulence. The comparison to synthetic observations indicates that the observed filaments are in magnetically dominated environments that could be supporting these filaments against collapse. Our results on the CMZ filaments are also compared to results obtained on similar filaments located in the Galactic disk, and we find that the filaments studied here are possible CMZ analogs to the dense filamentary “bones” observed previously in the Galactic disk.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	5101 Astronomical Sciences; 51 Physical Sciences; 0201 Astronomical and Space Sciences; 0202 Atomic, Molecular, Nuclear, Particle and Plasma Physics; 0306 Physical Chemistry (incl. Structural); Astronomy & Astrophysics; 5101 Astronomical sciences; 5107 Particle and high energy physics; 5109 Space sciences
Subjects:	Q Science > QB Astronomy Q Science > QC Physics
Divisions:	Astrophysics Research Institute
Publisher:	IOP Publishing
Date of acceptance:	19 November 2025
Date of first compliant Open Access:	22 April 2026
Date Deposited:	22 Apr 2026 12:21
Last Modified:	22 Apr 2026 12:21
DOI or ID number:	10.3847/1538-4357/ae22ce
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/28426

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