Related papers: The Evaporating Massive Embedded Stellar Cluster I…
A detailed analysis of the Nuclear Stellar Cluster (NSC) concedes not only the existence of the Scluster with its fast-moving stars and the supermassive black hole (SMBH) Sgr A*. It also reveals an embedded region of gas and dust with an…
It is often assumed that the strong gravitational field of a super-massive black hole disrupts an adjacent molecular cloud preventing classical star formation in the deep potential well of the black hole. Yet, young stars have been observed…
Context: The existence of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) still poses challenges to theoretical and observational astronomers. Several candidates have been proposed, including the one in the IRS13 cluster in the Galactic centre, where…
The IRS 13E complex is an unusual concentration of massive, early-type stars at a projected distance of ~0.13 pc from the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Because of their similar proper motion and their…
Nuclear star clusters (NSCs) are located at the photometric and dynamical centers of the majority of galaxies. They are among the densest star clusters in the Universe. The NSC in the Milky Way is the only object of this class that can be…
Abridged: In one widely discussed model for the formation of nuclear star clusters (NSCs), massive globular clusters spiral into the center of a galaxy and merge to form the nucleus. It is now known that at least some NSCs coexist with…
The Galactic Center hosts a rotating disk of young stars between 0.05 and 0.5 pc of Sgr A*. The ``S-stars'' at a distance $<0.04$ pc, however, are on eccentric orbits with nearly isotropically distributed inclinations. The dynamical origin…
The history of star formation in the strong gravitational potential of the Galactic center has been of much interest, recently. We propose that the sub-parsec-scale disk of massive stars orbiting the massive black hole at the Galactic…
We present a detailed analysis of the kinematics of 112 stars that mostly comprise the high velocity S-cluster and orbit the super massive black hole SgrA* at the center of the Milky Way. For 39 of them orbital elements are known, for the…
A small cluster of massive stars residing in the Galactic center, collectively known as IRS13E, is of special interest due to its close proximity to Sgr A* and the possibility that an embedded intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) binds its…
Context: The Galactic Center IRS 13E cluster is located ~3.2'' from SgrA*. It is an extremely dense stellar association containing several Wolf-Rayet and O-type stars, at least four of which show a common velocity. Only half an arcsecond…
Nuclear star clusters (NSCs) are massive star clusters found in the innermost region of most galaxies. While recent studies suggest that low-mass NSCs in dwarf galaxies form largely out of the merger of globular clusters and NSCs in massive…
We present high-resolution seeing limited and AO NIR imaging observations of the stellar cluster within about one parsec of Sgr A*, the massive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. Stellar number counts and the diffuse background…
We aim at modelling small groups of young stars such as IRS 13N, 0.1 pc away from Sgr A*, which is suggested to contain a few embedded massive young stellar objects. We perform hydrodynamical simulations to follow the evolution of molecular…
The Galactic Center is an excellent laboratory for studying phenomena and physical processes that may be occurring in many other galactic nuclei. The Center of our Milky Way is by far the closest galactic nucleus, and observations with…
We present a detailed analysis of high resolution near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy of the potential star cluster IRS13E very close to the massive black hole in the Galactic Center. We detect 19 objects in IRS13E from Ks-band images,…
Nuclear Star Clusters (NSCs) are commonly observed in the centres of most galactic nuclei, including our own Milky Way. While their study can reveal important information about the build-up of the innermost regions of galaxies, the physical…
IRS~13E is an enigmatic compact group of massive stars located in projection only 3.6 arcseconds away from Sgr A*. This group has been suggested to be bounded by an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH). We present a multi-wavelength study of…
High spatial resolution observations in the 1 to 3.5 micron region of the Galactic Center source known historically as IRS 13 are presented. They include ground-based adaptive optics images in the H, Kp (2.12/0.4 micron) and L bands, NICMOS…
The Nuclear Stellar Disk has been a highly active star-forming region in the Milky Way for approximately the last 30 million years. Despite hosting prominent clusters like Arches, Quintuplet, and Nuclear Stellar, their combined mass is less…