Old and New Puzzles at the Galactic Center

Details Old and New Puzzles at the Galactic Center Old and New Puzzles at the Galactic Center

May 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dda....41.0301m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #41, #3.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.926

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The question of the origin of the young stars in the inner parsec of the Milky Way continues to challenge theorists. To this paradox of youth, we can now add a conundrum of old age: based on recent observations by three groups, the distribution of the late-type (old) stars in the inner parsec is very different than expected for a relaxed, steady-state density cusp around a supermassive black hole. Instead of a cusp, there is a parsec-scale core, with flat or even declining density toward Sgr A*. Two classes of model are currently competing to explain this surprising observation: unrelaxed models, in which the distribution that we see in the late-type stars is characteristic of the old populations generally in the core; and relaxed models, which do contain a density cusp, but not in the observed stars. I will discuss the pros and cons of these models.

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