MG14 - Talk detail

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The Galactic Center is a unique astrophysical laboratory. Due to its proximity, we can observe in unparalleled detail the interaction of the massive black hole with its stellar and gaseous environment. Adaptive Optics based imaging and spectroscopy in the near-infrared have revealed about 40 individual stellar orbits, that show conclusively that the Galactic Center harbours a dark compact object of 4 million solar masses. Due to the high precision of these measurements, relativistic effects in the stellar motions will be detectable in the near future. In 2011, we discovered a compact gas cloud (”G2”) with roughly 3 Earth masses that is falling on a near-radial orbit toward the black hole, with a pericenter passage in 2014. Our 10-year data set beautifully shows that G2 gets tidally sheared apart during the approach. We expect that hydrodynamics will get important in the coming years, as G2 collides with the ambient gas around the black hole. If some of the cloud’s material will fall into the black hole, this might be a unique opportunity to observe how gas feeds a massive black hole in a galactic nucleus.

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