Related papers: Weighing the cusp at the Galactic Centre
In the Milky Way the central massive black hole, SgrA*, coexists with a compact nuclear star cluster that contains a sub-parsec concentration of fast-moving young stars called S-stars. Their location and age are not easily explained by…
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…
Massive black holes (MBHs) in galactic nuclei are believed to be surrounded by a high density stellar cluster, whose mass is mostly in hard-to-detect faint stars and compact remnants. Such dark cusps dominate the dynamics near the MBH: a…
Pulsars, if existing and detectable in the immediate vicinity of the massive black hole (MBH) in the Galactic center (GC), may be used as a superb tool to probe both the environment and the metric of the central MBH. The recent discovery of…
Massive black holes are thought to reside at the centres of many galaxies, where they power quasars and active galactic nuclei. But most galaxies are quiescent, indicating that any central massive black hole present will be starved of fuel…
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…
Over a two year period (1995-1997), we have conducted a diffraction-limited imaging study at 2.2 microns of the inner 6"x6" of the Galaxy's central stellar cluster using the Keck 10-m telescope. The K band images obtained reveal a large…
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…
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 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 have obtained the first detection of spectral absorption lines in one of the high-velocity stars in the vicinity of the Galaxy's central supermassive black hole. Both Brgamma (2.1661 micron) and He I (2.1126 micron) are seen in…
The orbit of the S2 star around Sagittarius A* provides a unique opportunity to test general relativity and study dynamical processes near a supermassive black hole. Observations have shown that the orbit of S2 is consistent with a…
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…
The young stars near the supermassive black hole at the galactic center follow orbits that are nearly random in orientation and that have an approximately thermal distribution of eccentricities, N(e) ~ e. We show that both of these…
Compact remnants -- stellar mass black holes and neutron stars formed in the inner few parsec of galactic centres are predicted to sink into the central parsec due to dynamical friction on low mass stars, forming a high concentration cusp…
Various past theoretical considerations and observational efforts suggest the presence of a population of stellar-mass black holes in the innermost parsec of the Galactic centre. In this Letter, we investigate the impact of these black…
There is now dynamical evidence for massive dark objects at the center of several galaxies, but suggestions that these are supermassive black holes are based only on indirect astrophysical arguments. The recent unprecedented measurement of…
We use numerical simulations to investigate the cusp at the centre of elliptical galaxies, due to the slow growth of a super-massive black hole. We study this problem for axisymmetric models of galaxies, with or without rotation. The…
Pulsars around the Massive Black Hole (MBH) in the Galactic Center (GC) are expected to be revealed by the incoming facilities (e.g., the Square Kilometre Array). Under a full relativistic framework with the pulsar approximated as a test…
Two disks of young stars have recently been discovered in the Galactic Center. The disks are rotating in the gravitational field of the central black hole at radii r=0.1-0.3 pc and thus open a new opportunity to measure the central mass. We…