Related papers: Hypervelocity Stars and the Galactic Center
In this paper we review and discuss some of the intriguing properties of the Galactic Center supermassive black hole candidate Sgr A*. Of all possible black hole sources, the event horizon of Sgr A*, subtends the largest angular scale on…
Hyper-velocity stars (HVS) are enigmatic objects because they are travelling so fast that they escape from the Galaxy. Among hot subdwarfs, only one such star is known, the He-sdO US 708. The Hyper-MUCHFUSS collaboration provided additional…
Studying the orbital motion of stars around Sagittarius A* in the Galactic Center provides a unique opportunity to probe the gravitational potential near the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Galaxy. Interferometric data obtained…
We propose a new way to search for hypervelocity stars in the Galactic bulge, by using red clump (RC) giants, that are good distance indicators. The 2nd Gaia Data Release and the near-IR data from the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV)…
The center of our Galaxy hosts the best constrained supermassive black hole in the universe, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Its mass and distance have been accurately determined from stellar orbits and proper motion studies, respectively, and its…
The existence of a massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, coinciding with the radio source Sgr A*, is being established on more and more solid ground. In principle, this black hole, acting as a gravitational lens, is able to…
Galaxy mergers lead to the formation of massive black hole binaries which can accelerate background stars close to the speed of light. We estimate the comoving density of ejected stars with a peculiar velocity in excess of $0.1c$ or $0.5c$…
Stellar clusters are potential acceleration sites of very-high-energy (VHE, E > 100GeV) particles since they host supernova remnants (SNRs) and pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe). Additionally, in stellar clusters, particles can also be accelerated…
As the closest example of a galactic nucleus, the Galactic center (GC) presents an exquisite laboratory for learning about supermassive black holes (SMBH) and their environment. We describe several exciting new research directions that,…
Winds from massive stars supply ~ 10^{-3} solar masss/year of gas to the central parsec of the Galactic Center. Spherically symmetric hydrodynamic calculations show that ~ 1 % of this gas, or ~ 10^{-5} solar masses/year, flows in towards…
The central regions of galaxies show the presence of massive black holes and/or dense stellar systems. The question about their modes of formation is still under debate. A likely explanation of the formation of the central dense stellar…
The Galactic Center has long been a region of interest for high-energy and very-high-energy observations. Many potential sources of GeV/TeV gamma-ray emission have been suggested, e.g., the accretion of matter onto the black hole, cosmic…
We consider global HI and optical properties of about three hundred nearby galaxies with V$_0 < 500$ km/s. The majority of them have individual photometric distance estimates. The galaxy sample parameters, e.g. their linear diameters, their…
The majority of nearby early-type galaxies contains detectable amounts of emission-line gas at their centers. The emission-line ratios and gas kinematics potentially form a valuable diagnostic of the nuclear activity and gravitational…
We measure the projected rotational velocities of the late B-type hypervelocity stars HVS7 and HVS8 from high resolution spectroscopy to be 60 +/- 17 km/s and 260 +/- 70 km/s. The 'slow' rotation of HVS7 is in principle consistent with…
The Galactic Anticenter Stellar Structure (GASS) has been identified with excess surface densities of field stars in several large area sky surveys, and with an unusual, string-like grouping of star clusters. Some members of the cluster…
Over the last 15 years, around a hundred very young stars have been observed in the central parsec of our Galaxy. While the presence of young stars forming one or two stellar disks at approx. 0.1 pc from the supermassive black hole (SMBH)…
The young stars near the supermassive black hole at the galactic center follow orbits that are nearly random in orientation and that have an approximately thermal distribution of eccentricities, N(e) ~ e. We show that both of these…
The long-standing issues of determination of the mass distribution and nature of the center of our Galaxy could be probed by a lensing experiment capable of testing the spatial and velocity distributions of stars nearby and beyond it. We…
The presence of dark matter in the Universe is nowadays widely supported by a large body of astronomical and cosmological observations. One of the best targets to look for dark matter particle self-annihilation into very high energy…