ALMA Central Molecular Zone Exploration Survey (ACES) II: 3mm continuum images
Abstract
The ALMA Central Molecular Zone Exploration Survey, ACES, has mapped square arcminutes at 3 mm toward the center of our Galaxy. ACES provides the first large-scale, high-resolution (") view of the central parsecs of the Milky Way. In this work, we describe the continuum data processing and present the continuum data products. In the combined mosaic of 45 individual ALMA mosaics, the typical RMS noise achieved is mJy per " beam, though there is a tail of substantially higher noise toward regions with bright continuum structure, especially around Sgr A* and Sgr B2. In-band spectral indices are measurable for a small fraction of the brightest and most compact sources, enabling distinction between dust-dominated and free-free- or synchrotron-dominated sources. To recover emission on large angular scales, we present the GBT MUSTANG-2 Three millimeter Extended Nucleus Survey (TENS), a new 10"resolution survey of the CMZ, which we combine with the ACES image by feathering. To demonstrate the quality and reliability of the ACES data, we compare to previously-published ALMA data obtained with higher resolution and sensitivity, finding overall good agreement with past results, but some disagreement toward the brightest sources.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.20240,
title = {ALMA Central Molecular Zone Exploration Survey (ACES) II: 3mm continuum images},
author = {Adam Ginsburg and Daniel L. Walker and Ashley T. Barnes and Xing Lu and Álvaro Sánchez-Monge and Jaime E. Pineda and Marc W. Pound and Pei-Ying Hsieh and Katharina Immer and Qizhou Zhang and Nazar Budaiev and Savannah R. Gramze and Desmond Jeff and Claire Cook and Alyssa Bulatek and Elisabeth A. C. Mills and John Bally and Laura Colzi and Pablo García and Jonathan D. Henshaw and Izaskun Jiménez-Serra and Ralf S. Klessen and Simon R. Dicker and Steven N. Longmore and Francisco Nogueras-Lara and Víctor M. Rivilla and Miriam G. Santa-Maria and Q. Daniel Wang and Fengwei Xu and Cara Battersby and Paul T. P. Ho and J. M. Diederik Kruijssen and Maya Petkova and Mattia C. Sormani and Robin G. Tress and Jennifer Wallace and J. Armijos-Abendaño and Lucia Armillotta and N. Bijas and Rojita Buddhacharya and Laura A. Busch and Natalie O. Butterfield and Mélanie Chevance and Samuel Crowe and Ana Karla Díaz-Rodríguez and Katarzyna M. Dutkowska and Rubén Fedriani and Christoph Federrath and Simon C. O. Glover and Qi-Lao Gu and Rebecca J. Houghton and Yue Hu and Namitha Issac and Janik Karoly and Mark R. Krumholz and Fu-Heng Liang and Sergio Martín and Farideh Mazoochi and Xing Pan and Dylan Paré and Thushara G. S. Pillai and Denise Riquelme-Vásquez and Anika Schmiedeke and Yoshiaki Sofue and Volker Tolls and Gwenllian M. Williams and Suinan Zhang and Emily Moravec and Charles E. Romero and Brian S. Mason and John Orlowski-Scherer and H Perry Hatchfield},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.20240},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Accepted to MNRAS. Website is https://sites.google.com/view/aces-cmz/home and data release is linked from there. Pipeline code is at https://github.com/ACES-CMZ/reduction_ACES/releases/tag/2026-02-18