Related papers: Hypervelocity Stars and the Galactic Center
Various scenarios have been proposed to explain the origin of the Galactic high-velocity clouds, predicting different distances and implying widely varying properties for the Galaxy's gaseous halo. To eliminate the difficulties of studying…
Gravitational 3-body interaction among binary stars and the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of the Milky Way occasionally ejects a hypervelocity star (HVS) with a velocity of ~1000 km/s. Due to the ejection location, such a HVS…
The evidence for the presence of a concentration of dark matter at the Galactic center is now very compelling. There is no question that the stellar and gas kinematics within 0.01 pc is dominated by under-luminous matter in the form of…
The hypervelocity star SDSS J090745.0+024507 in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy (Brown et al. 2005) most likely originated from the breakup of a binary star system by the central black hole, SgrA* (Hills 1988). We examine the fate of…
The center of the Milky Way hosts a massive black hole. The observational evidence for its existence is overwhelming. The compact radio source Sgr A* has been associated with a black hole since its discovery. In the last decade,…
The High-Velocity Clouds (HVCs) observed in the Galactic neighbourhood, have been proposed to be remnants of the formation of the galaxies in the Local Group, having distances, and thus masses, predominantly of dark matter, considerably…
A supermassive black hole ejected from the center of a galaxy by gravitational wave recoil carries a retinue of bound stars - a "hypercompact stellar system" (HCSS). The numbers and properties of HCSSs contain information about the merger…
The Galactic Centre has been studied with the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) for over 10 years, revealing a bright, complex gamma-ray morphology. Besides a strong point-like very-high-energy gamma-ray source coincident with the…
We estimate the number of individual, fast-moving stars observable in globular clusters under the assumption that the clusters contain massive central black holes which follow the galactic black-hole mass vs. sigma relationship. We find…
The center of the Galaxy is a prominent source in X-rays and gamma-rays. The study of its high-energy (HE) emission is crucial in understanding the physical phenomena taking place in this dense and extreme environment, where the closest…
Over a two year period (1995-1997), we have conducted a diffraction-limited imaging study at 2.2 microns of the inner 6"x6" of the Galaxy's central stellar cluster using the Keck 10-m telescope. The K band images obtained reveal a large…
Many high velocity HI clouds (HVCs) are now believed to be scattered throughout the Galactic halo on scales of tens of kiloparsecs. Some of these clouds appear to contain substantial HI masses (>10^6 Msun). It has been suggested that these…
Our view of the high velocity cloud (HVC) system is changing dramatically with new observations from the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer mission and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. In…
This is a pedagogical review of recent results on the interactions of central massive black holes with stars very near them, focused on the black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Table of contents: [1] Introduction [2] Stellar dynamics…
The nature of Galactic Center could be probed by lensing experiments capable of testing the spatial and velocity distributions of stars nearby and beyond it. Several hypotheses are possible (e.g. massive neutrino condensation, boson star)…
Recent Gaia observations suggest that some hypervelocity stars (HVSs) might originate from outside the Galaxy. We ask if these HVSs could come from as far as Andromeda. Therefore, we simulate HVSs originating in Andromeda with initial…
Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) unbound to the Galaxy can be formed with extreme stellar interactions. Observational evidence comes from measurements of radial velocities (RVs) of objects crossing the Galactic halo and of tangential velocities…
Context: Hyper-velocity stars move so fast that only a supermassive black hole (SMBH) seems to be capable to accelerate them. Hence the Galactic centre (GC) is their only suggested place of origin. Edelmann et al. (2005) found the early…
The Galactic Center is an excellent laboratory for studying phenomena and physical processes that may be occurring in many other galactic nuclei. The Center of our Milky Way is by far the closest galactic nucleus, and observations with…
Context. Although a variety of techniques have been employed for determining the Milky Way dark matter halo mass distribution, the range of allowed masses spans both light and heavy values. Knowing the precise mass of our Galaxy is…