Molecular Line Observations of the Galactic Center Region.

A decade of galactic center observations at the Crawford Hill 7 m antenna are summarized. The galactic center region contains several hundred high-mass, high-density molecular clouds with physical properties very different from clouds in the outer galactic disk. There is also a considerable amount of molecular gas not bound into clouds, but sheared by differential rotation into a molecular inter-cloud medium not seen elsewhere in the Galaxy. These observations can be explained by a combination of the tidal density limit and the virial theorem. The distribution of emission on the sky and in velocity suggests that most of the dense gas is confined to a 500 pc long ridge of emission which may be dust lane along the central bar.