Coffee talks
Wednesday 09/09/2026 @ 11:30, Sala riunioni quarto piano e on-line (meet.google.com/sue-bwvk-axf)
Survi Kumari (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland), "High-Mass Star Formation across the Milky Way"
Massive stars are key drivers of the chemical evolution of the interstellar medium (ISM) , shaping its energy budget, chemistry, and metal content through radiative, mechanical, and chemical feedback. Their role in enriching the ISM with heavy elements has a critical impact on the metallicity of this environments and, in turn, on the conditions under which future generations of stars are born. Within the Milky Way, these environmental conditions vary systematically with Galactocentric radius, governed largely by a well-established negative metallicity gradient. Despite the clear potential for these gradients to alter the physical and chemical properties of high-mass star-forming regions, their quantitative impact on the star formation process remains poorly constrained. In this talk, I will present an investigation of high-mass star formation across the Galactic disk, combining molecular line observations of two complementary samples: high-mass star-forming clumps in the inner Galaxy, and high-mass protostellar objects spanning a wide range of Galactocentric radii in the outer Galaxy. I will first demonstrate the diagnostic power of deuterated molecules as tracers of evolutionary stages of high-mass star formation. I will then characterise the dense gas fraction and chemistry of high-mass star-forming regions in the outer Galaxy, where metallicity, dust-to-gas ratio, interstellar radiation field, and elemental abundances differ substantially from conditions in the solar neighbourhood. This combined view allows us to directly probe how the environment shapes the physical and chemical conditions of massive star formation across the Milky Way.