Related papers: Accelerations of stars in central 2-7 arcsec from …
The S stars orbiting the Galactic center black hole reach speeds of up to a few percent the speed of light during pericenter passage. This makes, for example, S2 at pericenter much more relativistic than known binary pulsars, and opens up…
At the center of the Milky Way lurks a unique compact nonthermal radio source, Sgr A*. It is thought to be powered by a 2.6 million solar mass black hole that is accreting the stellar winds from the numerous early-type stars that exist in…
We present the results of the first systematic search for spectroscopic binaries within the central 2 x 3 arcsec$^2$ around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This survey is based primarily on over a decade…
New and existing K-band spectra for 19 Galactic center late-type stars have been analyzed along with representative spectra of disk and bulge M giants and supergiants. Absorption strengths for strong atomic and molecular features have been…
Sagittarius A*, the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, is surrounded by a small cluster of high velocity stars, known as the S-stars. We aim to constrain the amount and nature of stellar and dark mass associated with…
A cold neutral and extremely dim accretion disk may be present as a remnant of a past vigorous activity around the black hole in our Galactic Center (GC). Here we discuss ways to detect such a disk through its interaction with numerous…
We present our recent efforts to unveil and understand the origin of massive stars outside the three massive star clusters in the Galactic Center. From our HST/NICMOS survey of the Galactic Center, we have identified 180 Paschen-alpha…
A summary of the current knowledge on hypervelocity stars (HVSs). HVSs are fascinating because their properties are linked to Sgr A* and the stellar environment of the Galactic Center. Observing the distribution of HVSs can address: 1) the…
S-stars in the Galactic Center are excellent testbeds of various general relativistic effects. While previous works focus on modeling their orbital motion around Sgr A*--the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center--here we explore…
In accretion-based models for Sgr A* the X-ray, infrared, and millimeter emission arise in a hot, geometrically thick accretion flow close to the black hole. The spectrum and size of the source depend on the black hole mass accretion rate…
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…
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…
The Galactic Center is the closest galactic nucleus that can be studied with unprecedented angular resolution and sensitivity. We summarize recent basic observational results on Sagittarius A* and the conditions for star formation in the…
Using the recently commissioned multi-object spectrograph AAOmega on the 3.9m AAT we have obtained medium-resolution near-infrared spectra for 10,500 stars in and around five southern globular clusters. The targets were 47 Tuc, M12, M30,…
We consider the time derivatives of the period $P$ of pulsars at the Galactic Center due to variations in their orbital Doppler shifts. We show that in conjunction with a measurement of a pulsar's proper motion and its projected separation…
The Galactic Center contains some of the most extreme conditions for star formation in our Galaxy as well as many other phenomena that are unique to this region. Given our relative proximity to the Galactic Center, we are able to study…
The Arches cluster is an extraordinarily compact massive star cluster with a core radius of about 10$''$ ($\sim$0.4 pc) and consisting of more than 150 O star candidates with initial stellar masses greater than 20~M$_\odot$ near G0.12-0.02.…
There has been recent speculation (Davies & King 2005) that the cores of intermediate-mass stars stripped of their envelopes by tidal interaction with the supermassive black hole in the Galactic centre could form a population…
Open star clusters from the MWSC (Milky Way Star Clusters) catalogue have been used to determine the Galactic rotation parameters. The circular rotation velocity of the solar neighborhood around the Galactic center has been found from data…
Strong gravitational magnifications enable to detect faint background sources, resolve their internal structures, and even identify individual stars in distant galaxies. Highly magnified individual stars allow various applications,…