English

A stream of hypervelocity stars from the Galactic Center

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2021-02-03 v2

Abstract

Recent observations have found a 1700 km/s star [S5-HVS1] that was ejected from the Galactic Center approximately five million years ago. This star was likely produced by tidal disruption of a binary. In particular, the Galactic Center contains a few million year old stellar disk that could excite binaries to nearly radial orbits via a secular gravitational instability. Such binaries would be disrupted by the central supermassive black hole, and would also explain the observed cluster of B stars ~0.01 pc from the Galactic Center. In this paper we predict S5-HVS1 is part of a larger stream, and use observationally motivated N-body simulations to predict its spatial and velocity distribution.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.10267,
  title  = {A stream of hypervelocity stars from the Galactic Center},
  author = {Aleksey Generozov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.10267},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

7 pages, 3 figures. Accepted to ApJ (Main Journal). Version 2 includes corrections to Figure 1 described in an erratum (Aleksey Generozov 2021 ApJ 906 136)