Monitoring stellar orbits around the Massive Black Hole in the Galactic Center
Stefan Gillessen,Frank Eisenhauer,Sascha Trippe,Tal Alexander,Reinhard Genzel,Fabrice Martins,Thomas Ott +6 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the results of 16 years of monitoring stellar orbits around the massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, using high-resolution near-infrared techniques.
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Abstract: We present the results of 16 years of monitoring stellar orbits around the massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, using high-resolution near-infrared techniques. This work refines our previous analysis mainly by greatly improving the definition of the coordinate system, which reaches a long-term astrometric accuracy of 300 μas, and by investigating in detail the individual systematic error contributions. The combination of a long-time baseline and the excellent astrometric accuracy of adaptive optics data allows us to determine orbits of 28 stars, including the star S2, which has completed a full revolution since our monitoring began. Our main results are: all stellar orbits are fit extremely well by a single-point-mass potential to within the astrometric uncertainties, which are now 6× better than in previous studies. The central object mass is , where the fractional statistical error of 1.5% is nearly independent from R 0, and the main uncertainty is due to the uncertainty in R 0. Our current best estimate for the distance to the Galactic center is R 0 = 8.33 ± 0.35 kpc. The dominant errors in this value are systematic. The mass scales with distance as (3.95 ± 0.06) × 106(R 0/8 kpc)2.19 M ☉. The orientations of orbital angular momenta for stars in the central arcsecond are random. We identify six of the stars with orbital solutions as late-type stars, and six early-type stars as members of the clockwise-rotating disk system, as was previously proposed. We constrain the extended dark mass enclosed between the pericenter and apocenter of S2 at less than 0.066, at the 99% confidence level, of the mass of Sgr A*. This is two orders of magnitudes larger than what one would expect from other theoretical and observational estimates.
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Citations
On the rotationally driven pevatron in the centre of the Milky Way
TL;DR: Based on the collective linear and nonlinear processes in a magnetized plasma surrounding the black hole at the galactic center (GC), an acceleration mechanism is proposed to explain the recent detection/discovery of PeV protons as discussed by the authors.
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Black Hole Variability and The Star Formation-AGN Connection: Do All Star-forming Galaxies Host an AGN?
Ryan C. Hickox
- 01 Aug 2014
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate the effect of active galactic nucleus variability on the observed connection between star formation and black hole accretion in extragalactic surveys, and show that the apparent similarities in rest-frame colors, merger rates, and clustering of AGNs compared to “inactive” galaxies may be due to AGN variability.
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Synchrotron Self-Compton Scattering in Sgr A* Derived from NIR and X-Ray Flare Statistics
Abstract: The flaring activity of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) can be analyzed by statistical means to test emission models for its accretion flow. A particular modeling question is whether the observed X-ray flares are the high-energy end of a synchrotron spectrum or if they arise from self-Comptonized photons of a lower-energy synchrotron process. We use already published Chandra X-ray Visionary Project data to statistically investigate the X-ray count-rate distribution of Sgr A*. Two previous workgroups have already undertaken such an analysis on that data. They modeled the flaring part of the emission with a bounded power law, i.e., a power-law distribution with a hard cutoff at the highest measured count rate. With this model, both teams obtain a power-law index . We show that the flare count-rate distribution can also be well described by a truncated, i.e., an exponentially decaying power law. We argue that an exponential truncation is a more natural model than a hard cutoff. With this alternate model, our fit yields a power-law index . We find that this slope can be canonically explained by a synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) process. Therefore, we argue that SSC models are the best ones suitable to explain the observed X-ray count-rate distribution.
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Millimeter-wave Spectral Line Surveys Toward the Galactic Circumnuclear Disk and Sgr A *
Shunya Takekawa,Tomoharu Oka,Kunihiko Tanaka,Shinji Matsumura,Kodai Miura,Daisuke Sakai +5 more
- 01 Dec 2015
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors performed unbiased spectral line surveys at the 3 mm band toward the Galactic circumnuclear disk (CND) and Sgr A* using the Nobeyama Radio Observatory 45 m radio telescope.
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Estimating the Parameters of the Hybrid Palatini Gravity Model with the Schwarzschild Precession of S2, S38 and S55 Stars: Case of Bulk Mass Distribution
TL;DR: In this article , the authors estimate the parameters of the Hybrid Palatini gravity model with the Schwarzschild precession of S-stars, specifically of the S2, S38 and S55 stars.
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