Orbits and Origins of Young Stars in the Central Parsec of the Milky Way

Details Orbits and Origins of Young Stars in the Central Parsec of the Milky Way Orbits and Origins of Young Stars in the Central Parsec of the Milky Way

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.3305l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #33.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.785

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

2

Scientific paper

Based on 11 years of diffraction limited data from the Keck 10 m telescopes, we present new proper motion measurements for a puzzling population of massive, young stars located in the vicinity of the super-massive black hole at the Galactic Center. These measurements, along with data from the literature, constrain the true orbit of each star and allow us to directly test the hypothesis that the massive stars reside in two stellar disks as has been previously proposed based on a statistical analysis of the stars' three dimensional velocities. Our analysis of the stellar orbits of 72 stars reveals only one disk of young stars with 38 candidate members; and we place a 3σ limit for the second disk of less than 4 stars within a 30° opening angle. A single disk plus a more isotropic population suggests that all the young stars in this region could have formed in a single event such as the disruption of a star cluster, a molecular cloud-cloud collision, or the vertical collapse of a self-gravitating gas disk. The detected disk is nearly edge-on with an orientation of i=109° and Ω=105° and is geometrically thin with an opening angle of only 10° and a vertical velocity dispersion of 39 ± 6 km/s. There is an apparent over density of stars on the near side of the disk, which could be evidence of a coherent and eccentric disk, the remnant core of a cluster, or differential extinction between the near and far sides of the disk. Although we cannot conclusively distinguish between these explanations with our current data set, the detection of at least 7 disk stars with eccentricities greater than 0.2 may provide support for a coherent disk picture.

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