On the Road Toward a Deeper Understanding of Sgr A* and its Environment

Details On the Road Toward a Deeper Understanding of Sgr A* and its Environment On the Road Toward a Deeper Understanding of Sgr A* and its Environment

Mar 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004gcnew..17....5s&link_type=abstract

GCNEWS - Galactic Center Newsletter, vol. 17, p. 5-10 (eds. S. Markoff, L. Sjouwerman, Joseph Lazio, Cornelia Lang & Rainer Scho

Computer Science

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Galactic Center, Sgr A*, Infrared, Stars

Scientific paper

The last two years have been enormously fruitful for our NIR GC research. The NIR camera/AO system CONICA/NAOS at the ESO VLT unit telescope 4 was commissioned in late 2001/early 2002. The excellent imaging quality of the VLT in combination with the Paranal site, where the GC passes close to zenith, and the superb performance of the AO system (with its unique NIR wavefront sensor) are an ideal combination for deep, high resolution (40 milli-arcseconds at 1.7 micrometer) observations of the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster. Thanks to the new instrumentation we could finally confirm the existence of a stellar cusp around Sgr A*. Also, we can now measure stellar positions with an accuracy of 1-2 mas and derive meaningful proper motions of stars within about 40 mpc of Sgr A* with a time base of just two years. Two breakthroughs of the last two years were the determination of the orbit of S2 and the discovery of NIR flares and quiescent emission from Sgr A*. Below, we summarize some of the most important recent results and provide some outlook on the new measurements to come soon. We also report on the first simultaneous NIR/X-ray measurements of the emission from Sgr A*.

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