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Observations of the galactic center revealed a population of young massive stars within 0.4 pc from Sgr A* -- the presumed location of a supermassive black hole. The origin of these stars is a puzzle as their formation in citu should be…
Supermassive black holes in the centre of galaxies dominate the gravitational potential of their surrounding stellar clusters. In these dense environments, stars follow nearly Keplerian orbits, which get slowly distorted as a result of the…
Located at the core of the Galactic Centre, the S-star cluster serves as a remarkable illustration of chaos in dynamical systems. The long-term chaotic behaviour of this system can be studied with gravitational $N$-body simulations. By…
We identify a new secular instability of eccentric stellar disks around supermassive black holes. We show that retrograde precession of the stellar orbits, due to the presence of a stellar cusp, induces coherent torques that amplify…
After the amazing discoveries by the GRAVITY collaboration in the last few years on the star S2 orbiting the black hole Sgr A* in the center of the Milky Way, we present a detailed investigation of the impact of gravitational lensing on the…
This paper investigates the origin and orbital evolution of S stars in the Galactic center using models of binary disruption and relaxation processes. We focus on explaining the recently discovered ``zone of avoidance'' in S-star orbital…
The highly elliptical, 16-year-period orbit of the star S2 around the massive black hole candidate Sgr A* is a sensitive probe of the gravitational field in the Galactic centre. Near pericentre at 120 AU, ~1400 Schwarzschild radii, the star…
If a class of stars orbits the central black hole in our galaxy in short period (~ 0.1 year), high eccentricity (~ 0.9) orbits, they will experience precessions of their orbital planes induced by both relativistic frame-dragging and the…
The nature of the emission region around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center, remains under debate. A prediction of jet models is that a frequency-dependent shift in the position of the radio core…
Owing to the existence of an invariant length at the Planck scale, Einstein special relativity breaks down at that scale. A possible solution to this problem is arguably to replace the Poincar\'e invariant Einstein special relativity by a…
Measuring the stellar position angle provides valuable information on binary stellar formation or stellar spin axis evolution. We aim to develop a method for determining the absolute stellar position angle using spectro-astrometric analysis…
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…
The explicit derivation for the orbital precession of the S2 star in the Galactic Center in the Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity is discussed and compared with previous research. The two different predictions are validated by numerically…
The inclination $I$ of an Earth's satellite in polar orbit undergoes a secular De Sitter precession of $-7.6$ milliarcseconds per year for a suitable choice of the initial value of its non-circulating node $\Omega$. The competing…
Stellar rotation periods are valuable both for constraining models of angular momentum loss and for under- standing how magnetic features impact inferences of exoplanet parameters. Building on our previous work in the northern hemisphere,…
The "no-hair" theorem can, in principle, be tested at the center of the Milky Way by measuring the spin and the quadrupole moment of Sgr A$^*$ with the orbital precession of S-stars, measured over their full periods. Contrary to the…
Stars with short orbital periods at the center of our galaxy offer a powerful and unique probe of a supermassive black hole. Over the past 17 years, the W. M. Keck Observatory has been used to image the Galactic center at the highest…
We present new, more precise measurements of the mass and distance of our Galaxy's central supermassive black hole, Sgr A*. These results stem from a new analysis that more than doubles the time baseline for astrometry of faint stars…
Stellar orbits at the Galactic Center provide a very clean probe of the gravitational potential of the supermassive black hole. They can be studied with unique precision, beyond the confusion limit of a single telescope, with the…
The S-stars discovered in the Galactic center (GC) are expected to provide unique dynamical tests of the Kerr metric of the massive black hole (MBH) orbited by them. In order to obtain unbiased measurements of its spin and the related…