An astronomy invited talk by Dr Veena V. S. (Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, Bonn), exploring gas inflow, feedback, and star formation in the Milky Way’s Galactic Centre, highlighting how extreme nuclear environments regulate galactic evolution. 

Abstract:
The Galactic Centre (GC) is the Milky Way’s most extreme environment, hosting a supermassive black hole and displaying phenomena ranging from supernova remnants and magnetic loops to large-scale winds. Its proximity provides an unparalleled opportunity to probe, at high resolution, how gas dynamics, chemistry, and feedback processes interact in galactic nuclei. A key driver of activity in the GC is the gas inflow along the Galactic bar. Although this region is dominated by turbulence, shear, and tidal forces that are typically regarded as suppressing star formation, new observations show that stars are nevertheless forming within these high-velocity streams. By using shock and density sensitive molecules as diagnostic tools, it becomes possible to uncover the hidden conditions of the inflowing gas and to ask how star formation manages to persist in such a hostile environment. In addition, the detection of molecular gas in the GC outflow raises the question of how molecules can survive in extreme nuclear winds while being transported several hundred parsecs above the Galactic plane. These findings are particularly compelling because they provide direct evidence of large-scale feedback in a galaxy that is neither a starburst system nor hosts an AGN. This talk will highlight multiwavelength and multi-species results that link chemistry and dynamics to show how inflow and feedback regulate star formation in galactic nuclei, with implications for the long-term evolution of the Milky Way and other galaxies.