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3D CMZ. V. A New Orbital Model of Our Galaxy’s Center, Informed by Data Across the Electromagnetic Spectrum

  • Authors: Dani R. Lipman, Cara Battersby, Daniel Walker, Maïca Clavel, B.L. DuBois, Adam Ginsburg, Jonathan D. Henshaw, Ralf S. Klessen, Elisabeth A.C. Mills, Francisco Nogueras-Lara, Mattia C. Sormani, Robin G. Tress

Dani R. Lipman et al 2026 The Astrophysical Journal 1002 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 1.

We present a method to synthesize multiwavelength datasets to obtain most likely near/far positions of clouds in the CMZ and find a best-fitting elliptical orbit. Our methodology follows the above schematic from left to right: (1) we collect both near/far and line-of-sight distance constraints from a variety of methods across the electromagnetic spectrum (Section 2), (2) we build a Bayesian framework to combine these different data on a normalized near-to-far scale, producing positional probability density functions that peak at the most likely position of a given cloud (Section 3.1), (3) we find a best-fitting closed elliptical x2 orbit using each cloud’s PPV location and NF distribution (Section 3.2), and (4) we use the best-fit orbital model to present a preliminary top-down projection of the CMZ with line-of-sight distance estimates for all CMZ clouds (Section 4.3). The black star in panels (3) and (4) indicates the location of SgrA. The blue and red colors of clouds in panels (3) and (4) indicate likely near or far positions, respectively.

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