News

September 2022: Collaborative NSF grant awarded to fund ACES

May 2022: JACKS selected for observation in VLA Semester 22B

January 2022: Professor Mills joins PRIMA team as a co-I

July 2021: ACES selected as an ALMA Large Program

June 2020: Professor Mills is a Plenary Speaker at AAS

Professor Mills was awarded a $1.1 million NSF grant with co-PIs at UConn, Florida, CU-Boulder and SAO to support ACES science.

JACKS selected for observation in the 22B semester! Professor Mills is PI of this 110 hour A-ranked VLA project to map ammonia and radio continuum emission in the central 1.5 degrees of the Milky Way at arcsecond resolution.

Professor Mills has joined the PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics (PRIMA) team as a co-I. PRIMA will compete for a planned launch date in the coming decade. Find out more on our webpage and social media!

ALMA Large project ACES (ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey) is underway! Professor Mills is co-PI of this project which will map gas flows and star formation with unprecedented detail across the entire Milky Way center.

Professor Mills gave a plenary talk at the 236th meeting of the AAS, which was held virtually June 1-3, 2020. A recording of the talk can be found here. You can also view the talk slides and a transcript of the talk here

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About Us

Our group studies the physics and chemistry of gas in the most extreme environments in the nearby universe. We specialize in radio, millimeter, and infrared spectroscopy of galaxy centers, starbursts, and active supermassive black holes. We are committed to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment.

Code of Conduct

Current Group Members

Dr. Elisabeth (Betsy) Mills

Xinyu Mai

Ashley Lieber

Keaton Donaghue

Group Leader (current CV)

Github: eacmills

Graduate Researcher

Github: xymaiii

Graduate Researcher

Github: aelieber1

Undergraduate Researcher

Alumni and Associates

Jennifer Wallace

J. Andrew Casey-Clyde

Tierra Candelaria

Jonathan Barnes

Graduate Researcher (UConn)

Graduate Researcher (NMT)

Graduate Researcher (Howard U.)

Research

Our research focuses on studying the properties of the gas in the center of our galaxy and other nearby galaxies. We observe spectral lines from a range of molecules and try to figure out how much gas is present, where it is located, how it is moving, and its temperature, density, and chemical composition. We work to answer questions like how black holes are fed and grow, how galaxies shut off star formation through feedback, and how unique gas properties in galaxy centers impact the physics of these processes. Our work is done primarily with ground-based telescopes, especially radio and millimeter interferometers like the VLA and ALMA.

You can find and download all group publications here.

Interstellar Medium

Star Formation: The transformation of interstellar gas into stars and clusters and its subsequent impact on the surrounding environment (Mills et al. 2011; Mills et al. 2015)

Molecular Excitation: Using the quantum properties of molecules for remote sensing of gas temperatures, densities, and radiation fields (Mills and Morris 2013; Mills et al. 2018a)

Astrochemistry: The abundance, formation, and distribution of molecules, and the reactions that take place in interstellar gas. (Mills & Battersby 2017; Mills et al. 2018b)

The Galactic Center

The Central Molecular Zone: Inner 300 parsecs of the Milky Way, and the home of unusually hot, dense, turbulent, and chemically-rich molecular gas (Mills 2017)

The Circumnuclear Disk: Similar in size to an AGN torus, this 3 parsec-wide structure is the closest that molecular gas gets to the currently quiescent supermassive black hole (Mills et al. 2013; Mills, Kaufman, and Togi 2017)

Sgr B2 The most massive molecular cloud in the Galactic center, it is also the most chemically rich and hosts the most active star formation (Mills et al. 2018b; Mills et al. 2018c)

Nearby Spiral Galaxies

NGC 253: A barred spiral galaxy located 3.5 Mpc away, with a massive molecular outflow from a nuclear starburst producing 30x more new stars than the Milky Way center (Leroy et al. 2018; Mills et al. 2021; Levy et al. 2022)

NGC 4945: A nearby (3.8 Mpc) Seyfert galaxy with both an active black hole and a starburst at its center (Emig et al. 2020)

Circinus: A spiral galaxy at a distance of 4.2 Mpc from the Milky Way, hosting an active black hole that is believed to be the driving source of a molecular outflow (Zschaechner et al. 2018)

Contact

Elisabeth A.C. Mills

Assistant Professor

Department of Physics and Astronomy

University of Kansas

1251 Wescoe Hall Dr. Lawrence, KS 66045

Office: 2058B Malott Hall

Phone: 785.864.1778

E-mail: eacmills@ku.edu