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Published May 10, 2009 | Published
Journal Article Open

Dense, Parsec-Scale Clumps Near the Great Annihilator

Abstract

We report on Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy and James Clerk Maxwell Telescope observations toward the Einstein source 1E 1740.7–2942, a low-mass X-ray binary commonly known as the "Great Annihilator." The Great Annihilator is known to be near a small, bright molecular cloud in a region largely devoid of emission in ^(12)CO surveys of the Galactic center. This region is of interest because it is interior to the dust lanes which may be the shock zones where atomic gas from the HI nuclear disk is converted into molecular gas. We find that the region is populated with a large number of dense (n ~ 10^5 cm^(–3)) regions of excited gas with small filling factors. The gas appears to have turbulent support and may be the result of sprays of material from collisions in the shock zone. We estimate that ~(1-3) × 10^5 M⊙ of shocked gas resides in our r ~ 3', Δv_(LSR) = 100 km s^(–1) field. If this gas has recently shocked and is interior to the inner Lindblad resonance of the dominant bar, it is in transit to the x_2 disk, suggesting that a significant amount of mass may be transported to the disk by a low filling factor population of molecular clouds with low surface brightness in larger surveys.

Additional Information

© 2009 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2008 October 6; accepted 2009 February 17; published 2009 April 24. This research was funded in part by the Astronomy Department of the University of Maryland at College Park. The authors thank M. Leventhal for useful discussion of the diffuse 511 keV annihilation radiation in the Galactic plane, and R. Genzel & J. Zmuidzinas for motivation and support of the JCMT observations. We used 7 m Bell Labs data made publically available by J. Bally. Support for CARMA construction was derived from the states of California, Illinois, and Maryland, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, the Associates of the California Institute of Technology, and the National Science Foundation. Ongoing CARMA development and operations are supported by the National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement, and by the CARMA partner universities. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers AST- 0540450 and AST-0540399.

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