Related papers: Unveiling the Massive Stars in the Galactic Center

Serving as the progenitors of electromagnetic and gravitational wave transients, massive stars have received renewed interest in recent years. However, many aspects of their birth and evolution remain opaque, particularly in the context of…

We report chemical abundances obtained by SDSS-III/APOGEE for giant stars in five globular clusters located within 2.2 kpc of the Galactic centre. We detect the presence of multiple stellar populations in four of those clusters (NGC 6553,…

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 Galactic center (GC) is a dense and chaotic region filled with unusual sources, such as intense star forming regions, dense star clusters, nonthermal radio filaments, and a massive black hole. The proximity of the GC region makes it an…

High signal-to-noise, representative spectra of star-forming galaxies at z~2, obtained via stacking, reveal a high-velocity component underneath the narrow H-alpha and [NII] emission lines. When modeled as a single Gaussian, this broad…

The origin of the population of very massive stars observed within $\sim 0.4$ pc of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre is a mystery. Tidal forces from the black hole would likely inhibit {\it in situ} star formation whilst…

The origin of the X-ray emission from the central region of the Galaxy has remained a mystery, despite extensive study over the past two decades. A fundamental question is the relative contribution of the point-source and diffuse components…

Stars are most likely to merge or collide in regions of the highest stellar densities, and our own Galactic Center contains many stars packed into a relatively small volume -- even the ambient stellar number density in the central 50 pc is…

We use new Gaia measurements to explore the origin of the highest velocity stars in the Hypervelocity Star Survey. The measurements reveal a clear pattern in the B-type stars. Halo stars dominate the sample at speeds about 100 km/s below…

We present strong gravitational lensing models for 37 galaxy clusters from the SDSS Giant Arcs Survey. We combine data from multi-band Hubble Space Telescope WFC3imaging, with ground-based imaging and spectroscopy from Magellan, Gemini,…

Young massive stars and stellar clusters continuously form in the Galactic disk, generating new HII regions within their natal giant molecular clouds and subsequently enriching the interstellar medium via their winds and supernovae. Massive…

To determine the nature of the recently discovered, ring-like stellar structure at the Galactic anticenter, we have collected spectra of a set of presumed constituent M giants selected from the 2MASS point source catalog. Radial velocities…

We have discovered a large number of circular and elliptical shells at 24 microns around luminous central sources with the MIPS instrument on-board the Spitzer Space Telescope. Our archival follow-up effort has revealed 90% of these…

(abridged) We present a catalog of 2357 point sources detected during 590 ks of Chandra observations of the 17-by-17 arcminute field around Sgr A*. This field encompasses a physical area of 40 by 40 pc at a distance of 8 kpc. The…

We present HST/NICMOS images at 0.2" resolution of the HI Paschen Alpha (PaA) emission line in a 70" x 90" region of the Galactic center centered on the non-thermal radio source Sgr A*. The majority of the emission arises from ionized gas…

During the last decade, hundreds of young massive cluster candidates have been detected in the disk of the Milky Way. We investigate one of these candidates, Mercer 81, which was discovered through a systematic search for stellar…

The centers of most galaxies in the local universe are occupied by compact, barely resolved sources. Based on their structural properties, position in the fundamental plane, and integrated spectra, these sources clearly have a stellar…

We explore the possibility that neutron stars accreting from the winds of main-sequence stellar companions account for a significant fraction of low-luminosity, hard X-ray sources (L_X <~ 10^35 ergs/s; 1-10 keV) in the Galaxy. This work was…

Very Large Array observations of the Galactic Center at 7 mm have produced an image of the 30 arcseconds surrounding Sgr A* with a resolution of 82x42 milliarcseconds (mas). A comparison with IR images taken simultaneously with the Very…

The scattering diameters of Sgr A* and several nearby OH masers (~ 1" at 1 GHz) indicate that a region of enhanced scattering is along the line of sight to the Galactic center. The scattering diameter of an extragalactic source seen through…