English

ALMA Central molecular zone Exploration Survey (ACES) III: Molecular line data reduction and HNCO and HCO$^{+}$ data

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-02-25 v1

Abstract

The ALMA Central molecular zone Exploration Survey (ACES) large program has observed the inner ~ 200 pc of the Milky Way at 3 mm (Band 3) using ALMA's 12m, 7m, and Total Power arrays. With an angular resolution of ~ 2", ACES provides a contiguous, multi-scale view of the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) via the dust continuum and a suite of molecular lines. We present an overview of the molecular line data processing for ACES and describe the first data release. We showcase the HNCO (4-3) and HCO+^{+} (1-0) data, which were targeted at high spectral resolution (0.2 km s1^{-1}) to trace the kinematics of the molecular gas in the CMZ. The HNCO and HCO+^{+} maps are compared with previous single-dish CMZ surveys and discrete ALMA observations of CMZ clouds to demonstrate the quality of the data. We highlight the ubiquity of parsec-scale, linear absorption features traced by HCO+^{+}. Their origin is unknown, and ACES provides the first opportunity to study these enigmatic features throughout the CMZ. We release the HNCO and HCO+^{+} cubes for all 45 ACES fields, along with the full cube mosaics which combine all fields into a contiguous mosaic of the CMZ. We additionally provide advanced products of these full mosaics, including integrated and peak intensity, noise, and position-velocity maps. These products provide substantial legacy value for the community, offering an unparalleled view of the physical and kinematic structure of the dense gas in the CMZ.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.20276,
  title  = {ALMA Central molecular zone Exploration Survey (ACES) III: Molecular line data reduction and HNCO and HCO$^{+}$ data},
  author = {Daniel L. Walker and Adam Ginsburg and Ashley T. Barnes and Xing Lu and Pei-Ying Hsieh and Álvaro Sánchez-Monge and Savannah R. Gramze and Nazar Budaiev and Marc W. Pound and Jaime E. Pineda and Alyssa Bulatek and Claire Cook and Jonathan D. Henshaw and Katharina Immer and Namitha Issac and Desmond Jeff and Fu-Heng Liang and Steven N. Longmore and Elisabeth A. C. Mills and Sergio Martín and Xing Pan and Thushara G. S. Pillai and Qizhou Zhang and John Bally and Cara Battersby and Laura Colzi and Paul T. P. Ho and Izaskun Jiménez-Serra and J. M. Diederik Kruijssen and Maya A. 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 Christoph Federrath and Rubén Fedriani and Pablo García and Simon C. O. Glover and Qi-Lao Gu and H Perry Hatchfield and Rebecca J. Houghton and Yue Hu and Janik Karoly and Ralf S. Klessen and Mark R. Krumholz and Farideh Mazoochi and Francisco Nogueras-Lara and Dylan Paré and Denise Riquelme-Vásquez and Víctor M. Rivilla and Miriam G. Santa-Maria and Anika Schmiedeke and Yoshiaki Sofue and Volker Tolls and Q. Daniel Wang and Gwenllian M. Williams and Fengwei Xu and Suinan Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.20276},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in 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