Constraining intermediate-mass black holes from the stellar disc of SgrA*
Astrophysics of Galaxies
2023-05-26 v1
Abstract
Stars evolving around a supermassive black hole see their orbital orientations diffuse efficiently, a process called "vector resonant relaxation". In particular, stars within the same disc, i.e. neighbors in orientations, will slowly diffuse away from one another through this stochastic process. We use jointly (i) detailed kinetic predictions for the efficiency of this dilution and (ii) the recent observation of a stellar disc around SgrA*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky-Way, to constrain SgrA*'s unobserved stellar cluster. Notably, we investigate quantitatively the impact of a population of intermediate mass black holes on the survivability of the stellar disc.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2305.15998,
title = {Constraining intermediate-mass black holes from the stellar disc of SgrA*},
author = {Jean-Baptiste Fouvry and María José Bustamante-Rosell and Aaron Zimmerman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.15998},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
10 pages, 10 figures, submitted to MNRAS