Related papers: Forming misaligned stellar discs around a massive …
The region around the center of our Galaxy is very dense of stars. The kinematics of inner moving stars in the Galaxy (the so called S-stars) has been deeply studied by different research groups leading to the conclusion of the existence of…
Molecular clouds at the Galactic center (GC) have environments considerably different from their disk counterparts. The GC may therefore provide important clues about how the environment affects star formation. Interestingly, while the…
Observations of distant bright quasars suggest that billion solar mass supermassive black holes (SMBHs) were already in place less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Models in which light black hole seeds form by the collapse of…
An attempt is made to reconcile the large wind-loss rates of stars in the Galactic Centre (GC) with the predicted low accretion rate for Sgr A*, the putative blackhole at the heart of the Milky Way. It is found that, independent of the…
We investigated the formation of arc-like structures in the infalling envelope around protostars, motivated by the recent Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the high-density molecular cloud core,…
We point out that a high number density of stars in the core of a dense star cluster such as the central stellar cluster at the Galactic center, where many stars possess strong stellar winds, should result in collisions of those winds. The…
In the past decade high resolution measurements in the infrared employing adaptive optics imaging on 10m telescopes have allowed determining the three dimensional orbits stars within ten light hours of the compact radio source at the center…
The hierarchical nature of galaxy formation suggests that a supermassive black hole binary could exist in our galactic center. We propose a new approach to constraining the possible orbital configuration of such a binary companion to the…
Semi-analytic models of galaxy formation typically form the spheroidal components of galaxies ("bulges"), solely through galactic major mergers. However, it is possible that non-merger events (e.g. a "fly-by" by a smaller halo) can perturb…
We present radio and infrared observations indicating on-going star formation activity inside the $\sim2-5$ pc circumnuclear ring at the Galactic center. Collectively these measurements suggest a continued disk-based mode of on-going star…
Recent observations of young stellar systems with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) are helping to cement the idea that close companion stars form via fragmentation of a…
The super-massive 4 million solar mass black hole Sagittarius~A* (SgrA*) shows flare emission from the millimeter to the X-ray domain. A detailed analysis of the infrared light curves allows us to address the accretion phenomenon in a…
We consider the long-term tidal heating of a star by the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center, SgrA*. We show that gravitational interaction with background stars leads to a linear growth of the tidal excitation energy with the…
High-resolution, multi-wavelength, and time-domain observations of the Galactic centre black hole candidate, Sgr A*, allow for a direct test of contemporary accretion theory. To date, all models have assumed alignment between the accretion…
We investigate the means by which cold gas can accrete onto Milky Way mass galaxies from a hot corona of gas, using a new smoothed particle hydrodynamics code, 'SPHS'. We find that the 'cold clumps' seen in many classic SPH simulations in…
There is growing evidence of star formation in the vicinity of supermassive black holes (SMBH) in galactic nuclei. A viable scenario for this process assumes infall of a massive gas cloud towards the SMBH and subsequent formation of a dense…
The cores of most galaxies are thought to harbour supermassive black holes, which power galactic nuclei by converting the gravitational energy of accreting matter into radiation (ref 1). Sagittarius A*, the compact source of radio, infrared…
Star formation proceeds via the collapse of a molecular cloud core over multiple dynamical timescales. Turbulence within cores results in a spatially non-uniform angular momentum of the cloud, causing a stochastic variation in orientation…
In an exploration of the birthplaces of globular clusters, we present a careful examination of the formation of self-gravitating gas clouds within assembling dark matter haloes in a hierarchical cosmological model. Our high-resolution…
Images from the vicinity of the black hole horizon at the Galactic centre (Sgr A*) could be obtained in the near future with a Very Large Baseline Array of sub-millimetre telescopes. The recently observed short-term infrared and X-ray…