Related papers: Constraining the Galactic Center Dark Cluster with…
The centers of galaxies host a supermassive black hole surrounded by a dense stellar cluster. The cluster is expected to develop mass segregation, in which gravitational scatterings among the stars cause heavier objects to sink closer to…
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…
Galactic nuclei are expected to be densely populated with stellar and intermediate mass black holes. Exploring this population will have important consequences for the observation prospects of gravitational waves as well as understanding…
The Galactic Center (GC) is potentially hosting the largest indirect signal from particle dark matter (DM), which in many well-motivated models would produce gamma rays as their final states. However, this region has often been dismissed…
Almost every galaxy has a supermassive black hole (SMBH) residing at its center, the Milky Way included. Recent studies suggest that these unique places are expected to host a high abundance of stellar and compact object binaries. These…
Our Galactic Center hosts over 10% of the known massive stars in the Galaxy. The majority of these stars are located in three particularly massive clusters that formed within the past 5 Myr. While these clusters are extraordinary, their…
The infall and merger scenario of massive clusters in the Milky Way's potential well, as one of the Milky Way formation mechanisms, is reexamined to understand how the stars of the merging clusters are redistributed during and after the…
The Galactic Centre {\gamma}-ray excess (GCE), observed by Fermi-LAT around Sgr A*, exceeds expectations from standard cosmic-ray models and is commonly attributed either to dark matter annihilation or to unresolved millisecond pulsars…
The mass assembly history of the Milky Way can inform both theory of galaxy formation and the underlying cosmological model. Thus, observational constraints on the properties of both its baryonic and dark matter contents are sought. Here we…
The presence of dark matter in the Universe is nowadays widely supported by a large body of astronomical and cosmological observations. The central region of the Milky Way is expected to harbor a large amount of dark matter.…
We have measured the central structural properties for a sample of S0-Sbc galaxies down to scales of ~10 pc using HST NICMOS images. We find that the photometric masses of the central star clusters, which occur in 58% of our sample, are…
We report on the nature of prominent sources of light and shadow in the Galactic Center. With respect to the Bremsstrahlung X-ray emission of the hot plasma in that region the Galactic Center casts a 'shadow'. The 'shadow' is caused by the…
The region bounded by the inner tens of light years at the center of the Milky Way contains five principal components that coexist within the central deep gravitational potential well. These constituents are a black hole candidate (Sgr~A*)…
(abridged) In this paper we revisit the problem of inferring the innermost structure of the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster via star counts, to clarify whether it displays a core or a cusp around the central black hole. Through image…
It is shown that the matter concentration observed through stellar motion at the galactic center (Eckart & Genzel, 1997, MNRAS, 284, 576 and Genzel et al., 1996, ApJ, 472, 153) is consistent with a supermassive object of $2.5 \times 10^6$…
The central region of the Milky Way provides a unique laboratory for a systematic, spatially-resolved population study of evolved massive stars of various types in a relatively high metallicity environment. We have conducted a…
Recent observations of the Galactic center in high-energy gamma-rays (above 0.1TeV) have opened up new ways to study this region, from understanding the emission source of these high-energy photons to constraining the environment in which…
Understanding dense matter under extreme conditions is one of the most fundamental puzzles in modern physics. Complex interactions give rise to emergent, collective phenomena. While nuclear experiments and Earth - based colliders provide…
The existence of dark matter (DM) at scales of few pc down to $\simeq 10^{-5}$ pc around the centers of galaxies and in particular in the Galactic Center region has been considered in the literature. Under the assumption that such a DM…
We present the first Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A$^*$), the Galactic center source associated with a supermassive black hole. These observations were conducted in 2017 using a global interferometric…