English

The Galactic Center with Roman

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2023-06-23 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Astrophysics of Galaxies Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

We advocate for a Galactic center (GC) field to be added to the Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey (GBTDS). The new field would yield high-cadence photometric and astrometric measurements of an unprecedented {\sim}3.3 million stars toward the GC. This would enable a wide range of science cases, such as finding star-compact object binaries that may ultimately merge as LISA-detectable gravitational wave sources, constraining the mass function of stars and compact objects in different environments, detecting populations of microlensing and transiting exoplanets, studying stellar flares and variability in young and old stars, and monitoring accretion onto the central supermassive black hole. In addition, high-precision proper motions and parallaxes would open a new window into the large-scale dynamics of stellar populations at the GC, yielding insights into the formation and evolution of galactic nuclei and their co-evolution with the growth of the supermassive black hole. We discuss the possible trade-offs between the notional GBTDS and the addition of a GC field with either an optimal or minimal cadence. Ultimately, the addition of a GC field to the GBTDS would dramatically increase the science return of Roman and provide a legacy dataset to study the mid-plane and innermost regions of our Galaxy.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.12485,
  title  = {The Galactic Center with Roman},
  author = {Sean K. Terry and Matthew W. Hosek and Jessica R. Lu and Casey Lam and Natasha Abrams and Arash Bahramian and Richard Barry and Jean-Phillipe Beaulieu and Aparna Bhattacharya and Devin Chu and Anna Ciurlo and Will Clarkson and Tuan Do and Kareem El-Badry and Ryan Felton and Matthew Freeman and Abhimat Gautam and Andrea Ghez and Daniel Huber and Jason Hunt and Macy Huston and Tharindu Jayasinghe and Naoki Koshimoto and Madeline Lucey and Florian Peißker and Anna Pusack and Clément Ranc and Dominick Rowan and Robyn Sanderson and Rainer Schödel and Richard G. Spencer and Rachel Street and Daisuke Suzuki and Aikaterini Vandorou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.12485},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

19 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to the NASA Roman Core Community Surveys White Paper Call

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:11:06.856Z