Greetings!
I am a fifth-year graduate student studying astronomy at UCLA.
My thesis work focuses on the center of our Milky Way galaxy, where I look at
cool molecular gas that emits at submillimeter and radio wavelengths.
I measure the temperature and density structure in these giant molecular clouds
to investigate what makes these clouds warmer than those in the disk of
our Galaxy, near the sun, and how these clouds get so large and massive without forming stars.
One region I am particularly interested in is the Circumnuclear disk at the center of the Galaxy. This is a rotating ring of gas and dust lying about 5 light years away from the central supermassive black hole. This structure is intriguing because it is the closest dense gas to the black hole, and the conditions in this gas may be influenced by its proximity. The future fate of this disk is unknown: will it fall into the black hole, or form stars?