The Milky Way's Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) differs dramatically from our local solar neighbourhood, both in the extreme interstellar medium conditions it exhibits and in the strong dynamics at play. Consequently, it is likely that there are large-scale physical structures within the CMZ that cannot form elsewhere in the Milky Way.
I will present first results from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Large Program ACES (ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey) that were published in Nonhebel et al. 2024. We investigated the origin of the M0.8-0.2 ring, a molecular cloud with a distinct ring-like morphology. The most likely cause of the M0.8–0.2 ring is a single high-energy hypernova explosion. To viably explain the observed morphology and kinematics, such an explosion would need to have taken place inside a dense, very massive molecular cloud, the remnants of which we now see as the M0.8–0.2 ring. In this case, the structure provides an extreme example of how supernovae can affect molecular clouds.
