English

Direct N-body simulation of the Galactic centre

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2019-01-21 v3 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

We study the dynamics and evolution of the Milky Way nuclear star cluster performing a high resolution direct one-million-body simulation. Focusing on the interactions between such stellar system and the central supermassive black hole, we find that different stellar components adapt their overall distribution differently. After 5 Gyr, stellar mass black holes are characterized by a spatial distribution with power-slope 1.75-1.75, fully consistent with the prediction of Bahcall-Wolf pioneering work. Using the vast amount of data available, we infer the rate for tidal disruption events, being 4×1064 \times 10^{-6} per yr, and estimate the number of objects that emit gravitational waves during the phases preceding the accretion onto the super-massive black hole, 270\sim 270 per Gyr. We show that some of these sources could form extreme mass-ratio inspirals. We follow the evolution of binary stars population, showing that the initial binary fraction of 5%5\% drops down to 2.5%2.5\% inside the inner parsec. Also, we explored the possible formation of binary systems containing a compact object, discussing the implications for millisecond pulsars formation and the development of Ia Supernovae.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.02153,
  title  = {Direct N-body simulation of the Galactic centre},
  author = {Taras Panamarev and Andreas Just and Rainer Spurzem and Peter Berczik and Long Wang and Manuel Arca Sedda},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.02153},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted by MNRAS after a major revision

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:46:11.616Z