Related papers: Constraining the Galactic Center Dark Cluster with…
One of the key science goals for a diffraction limited imager on an Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is the resolution of individual stars down to faint limits in distant galaxies. The aim of this study is to test the proposed capabilities…
The spatial distribution of compact dark matter in our Galaxy can be determined in a few years of monitoring Galactic globular clusters for microlensing. Globular clusters are the only dense fields of stars distributed throughout the…
The simplest interpretation of the microlensing events towards the Large Magellanic Cloud detected by the MACHO and EROS collaborations is that about one third of the halo of our own Milky Way galaxy exists in the form of objects of around…
We consider the absorption and scattering of X-rays observed from the Galactic center. One objective is to characterize the intrinsic X-ray emission from the central black hole, SgrA*, in its quiescent and flaring states. We correct the…
Recent numerical simulations of globular clusters (GCs) have shown that stellar-mass black holes (BHs) play a fundamental role in driving cluster evolution and shaping their present-day structure. Rapidly mass-segregating to the center of…
The center of our galaxy is home to a massive black hole, SgrA*, and a nuclear star cluster containing stellar populations of various ages. While the late type stars may be too old to have retained memory of their initial orbital…
The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) with the Vera Rubin Observatory will provide strong microlensing constraints on dark compact objects (DCOs) in our Galaxy. However, most current forecasts limit their analysis to Primordial Black…
Particle dark matter near the galactic center is accreted by the central black hole into a dense spike, strongly enhancing its annihilation rate. Searching for its annihilation products may give us information on the presence or absence of…
This chapter provides a detailed overview of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, located in the dense Galactic Center region approximately 8 kpc from Earth. Despite its relatively low…
The lack of tangible evidence for non-gravitational interactions between dark and visible sectors drives the need for exploring new avenues of inferring dark matter properties through purely gravitational probes. In particular, addressing…
Through observational tests of strong lensing galaxy clusters, we can test simulation derived structure predictions that follow from $\Lambda$ Cold Dark Matter ($\Lambda$CDM) cosmology. The shape and centroid deviations between the total…
We present a novel method combining existing cosmological simulations and orbital integration to study the hierarchical assembly of globular cluster (GC) populations in the Milky Way (MW). Our method models the growth and evolution of GC…
Like most galaxies, the Milky Way harbors a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at its center, surrounded by a nuclear star cluster. In this dense star cluster, direct collisions can occur between stars before they evolve off the main-sequence.…
Annihilation radiation from neutralino dark matter at the Galactic center (GC) would be greatly enhanced if the dark matter were strongly clustered around the supermassive black hole (SBH). The existence of a dark-matter "spike" is made…
The central 0.1 parsecs of the Milky Way host a supermassive black hole identified with the position of the radio and infrared source Sagittarius A*, a cluster of young, massive stars (the S stars) and various gaseous features. Recently,…
The Galactic Center (GC) is dominated by the gravity of a super-massive black hole (SMBH), Sagittarius A$^*$, and is suspected to contain a sizable population of binary stars. Such binaries form hierarchical triples with the SMBH,…
Cold, dense gas clouds have been proposed as a major component of the Galactic dark matter; such clouds can be revealed by the gamma-ray emission which arises from cosmic-rays interacting with the gas. If this dark matter component is…
For the past few years, we have observed the central half parsec of our Galaxy in the mid-infrared from 2.8 to 5.1 micron. Our aim is to improve our understanding of the direct environment of SgrA*, the supermassive blackhole at the centre…
While there is evidence for the existence of dark matter, its properties have yet to be discovered. Simultaneously, the nature of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos detected by IceCube remains unresolved. If dark matter and neutrinos are…
The main objective of the Cosmic-Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory (CREDO) is the detection and analysis of extended cosmic ray phenomena, so-called super-preshowers (SPS), using existing as well as new infrastructure (cosmic-ray…