Related papers: Testing Properties of the Galactic Center Black Ho…
The massive Galactic black hole and the stars around it are a unique laboratory for studying how relaxation processes lead to close interactions of stars and compact remnants with the central massive black hole, in particular those leading…
Pulsars orbiting the Galactic center black hole, Sgr A*, would be potential probes of its mass, distance and spin, and may even be used to test general relativity. Despite predictions of large populations of both ordinary and millisecond…
Results of precise measurements of the periods of pulsars discovered in the central regions of globular clusters are shown to be approaching the capabilities of testing the existence of a central black hole. For example, in the case of M 15…
Inspired by the reported existence of substantive magnetic fields in the vicinity of the central supermassive black holes in Sagitarius A* and Messier 87*, we consider test particle motion in the spacetime close to a generic spherical black…
A new statistical method for pinpointing the massive black hole (BH) in the Galactic Center on the IR grid is presented and applied to astrometric IR observations of stars close to the BH. This is of interest for measuring the IR emission…
We examine the effect of an accretion disc on the orbits of stars in the central star cluster surrounding a central massive black hole by performing a suite of 39 high-accuracy direct N-body simulations using state-of-the art software and…
Astrometry and spectroscopy of the S-stars in the Galactic Center provide a unique way to probe the properties of the central supermassive black hole, as well as the post-Newtonian effects caused by its gravity, e.g. gravitational redshift…
The black hole spacetime is described by general relativity and characterized by two quantities: the black hole mass and spin. Black hole spin measurement requires information from the vicinity of the event horizon, which is spatially…
The S-Stars in the Galactic-center region are found to be on near-perfect Keplerian orbits around presumably a supermassive black hole, with periods of 15-50 yr. Since these stars reach a few percent of light speed at pericenter, various…
The nuclear star cluster surrounding the massive black hole at the Galactic Centre consists of young and old stars, with most of the stellar mass in an extended, cuspy distribution of old stars. The compact cluster of young stars was…
Dwarf galaxies and globular clusters may contain intermediate mass black holes ($10^{3}$ to $10^{5}$ solar masses) in their cores. Estimates of ~$10^{3}$ neutron stars in the central parsec of the Galaxy and similar numbers in small…
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,…
We report on the expected astrometric performance of the Thirty Meter Telescope's InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer (IRIS) as determined using simulated images of the Galactic center. This region of the Galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole…
The Galactic center provides a unique astrophysical laboratory for us to study various astrophysical processes. In this paper, we review and outline the latest results from observations of Sgr~A$^*$ in terms of source structure and…
This review summarizes a few of the frontiers of Galactic center research that are currently the focus of considerable activity and attention. It is aimed at providing a necessarily incomplete sketch of some of the timely work being done on…
The geometry around a rotating massive body, which carries charge and electrical currents, could be described by its multipole moments (mass moments, mass-current moments, electric moments, and magnetic moments). When a small body is…
Neutron stars and black holes are the astrophysical systems with the strongest gravitational fields in the universe. In this article, I review the prospect of probing with observations of such compact objects some of the most intriguing…
An algorithm is described for evolving the phase-space density of stars or compact objects around a massive black hole at the center of a galaxy. The technique is based on numerical integration of the Fokker-Planck equation in…
Stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars represent extremes in gravity, density, and magnetic fields. They therefore serve as key objects in the study of multiple frontiers of physics. In addition, their origin (mainly in core-collapse…
Various past theoretical considerations and observational efforts suggest the presence of a population of stellar-mass black holes in the innermost parsec of the Galactic centre. In this Letter, we investigate the impact of these black…