The CMZoom Catalog of Compact Submillimeter Dust Continuum Sources in the Milky Way’s Central Molecular Zone

The SMA Legacy Survey, CMZoom, has mapped the wealth of compact substructure within all high-column density clouds in the Milky Way’s innermost 500pc. Using a pruned dendrogram, we catalog nearly all compact submillimeter dust continuum sources capable of forming massive stars in the Milky Way’s central molecular zone (CMZ), studying the distributions of source properties and placing an upper limit on the Galactic Center’s overall star formation potential. In the context of the many clouds surveyed, we find that the star forming complex Sagittarius B2 has anomalously high source masses, likely due to free-free emission, high dust temperatures and complicated line-of-sight structure. The CMZoom catalog reveals our Galactic center to have a great diversity of substructure, with both intensely star forming and entirely quiescent dense gas structures. The relationship between the dust continuum source properties and previously cataloged tracers of star formation is being actively investigated to help understand massive star formation within the extreme environment of the CMZ.