Related papers: The need for a second black hole at the Galactic c…
The motions of gas and stars in the nuclei of nearby large galaxies have demonstrated that massive black holes are common and that their masses strongly correlate with the stellar velocity dispersion $\sigma_{\star}$ of the bulge. This…
Observational work conducted over the last few decades indicates that all massive galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centres. Although the luminosities and brightness fluctuations of quasars in the early Universe suggest that…
If supermassive black holes in centres of galaxies form by merging of black-hole remnants of massive Population III stars, then there should be a few black holes of mass one or two orders of magnitude smaller than that of the central ones,…
Over the last 15 years, around a hundred very young stars have been observed in the central parsec of our Galaxy. While the presence of young stars forming one or two stellar disks at approx. 0.1 pc from the supermassive black hole (SMBH)…
Supermassive black holes with masses of millions to billions of solar masses are commonly found in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers seek to image jet formation using radio interferometry, but still suffer from insufficient angular…
We analyze three sets of infrared star counts in the inner ~0.5 pc of the Galactic Center. We perform statistical tests on the star counts and model in detail the extinction field and the effects of dwarf-giant collisions on the luminosity…
Holz & Wheeler (\cite{hw}) have recently proposed that a Schwarzschild black hole may act as a retro-lens which, if illuminated by a powerful light source, deflects light ray paths to large bending angles and a series of luminous arcs (or…
The Galactic Center is the closest galactic nucleus that allows us to determine the multi-frequency behavior of the supermassive black hole counterpart Sagittarius A* in great detail. We put SgrA*, as a nucleus with weak activity, into the…
We developed a numerical methodology to compute the fully-relativistic propagation time of photons emitted by a pulsar in orbit around a massive compact object, like the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* in the Galactic Center, whose…
Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) is a compact radio source at the Galactic center. Observations have confirmed that its mass is approximately (4.1)*10$^{6}$ M$_{\odot}$, and Sgr A* is generally believed to be powered by gas accretion onto a…
I report the discovery of a new effect of General Relativity which is important to understand very rapidly rotating (Kerr) black holes. The orbital velocity of a test particle is no longer a monotonic function of the orbit radius when the…
The compact dark objects with very large masses residing at the centres of galaxies are believed to be black holes. Due to the gravitational lensing effect, they would cast a shadow larger than their horizon size over the background, whose…
We analyze the properties of the star S2 orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy. A high quality SINFONI H and K band spectrum obtained from coadding 23.5 hours of observation between 2004 and 2007 reveals that S2…
Studying the orbital motion of stars around Sagittarius A* in the Galactic Center provides a unique opportunity to probe the gravitational potential near the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Galaxy. Interferometric data obtained…
We show that with a Next Generation Large Telescope one can detect the accelerated motions of ~100 stars orbiting the massive black hole at the Galactic center. The positions and velocities of these stars will be measured to astrometric and…
Sagittarius A* (SgrA*) lying in the Galactic Centre $8$ kpc from Earth, hosts the closest supermassive black hole known to us. It is now inactive, but there is evidence indicating that about six million years ago it underwent a powerful…
Despite intensive searches, the only pulsar within 0.1 pc of the central black hole in our Galaxy, Sgr A*, is a radio-loud magnetar. Since magnetars are rare among the Galactic neutron star population, and a large number of massive stars…
Recent observations and stellar dynamics simulations suggest that thousand solar mass black holes can form in compact massive young star clusters. Any such clusters in the bulge of their host galaxy will spiral to the center within a few…
The Galactic center stellar disk and the circumnuclear ring provide a unique opportunity to study in detail the dynamics and physical conditions of distant molecular disks in the nuclei of galaxies. One of the key questions is how these…
We study the young S-stars within a distance of 0.04 pc from the supermassive black hole in the center of our Galaxy. Given how inhospitable the region is for star formation, their presence is more puzzling the younger we estimate their…