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Register a new userStatistical Challenges in Fitting Stellar Orbits around the Supermassive Black Hole at the Galactic Center
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Over two decades of astrometric and radial velocity data of short period stars in the Galactic center have the potential to provide unprecedented tests of General Relativity and insight into the astrophysics of supermassive black holes. Fundamental to this is understanding the underlying statistical issues of fitting stellar orbits. Unintended prior effects can obscure actual physical effects from General Relativity and the underlying extended mass distribution. At the heart of this is dealing with large parameter spaces inherent to multi star fitting and ensuring acceptable coverage properties of the resulting confidence intervals within the Bayesian framework. This proceeding will detail some of the UCLA Galactic Center Groups analysis and work in addressing these statistical issues.
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We present new proper motion measurements and simultaneous orbital solutions for three newly identified (S0-16, S0-19, and S0-20) and four previously known (S0-1, S0-2, S0-4, and S0-5) stars at the Galactic Center. This analysis pinpoints the Galaxys central dark mass to within +-1 milli-arcsec and, for the first time from orbital dynamics, limits its proper motion to 1.5+-0.5 mas/y, which is consistent with our derivation of the position of Sgr A* in the infrared reference frame (+-10 mas). The estimated central dark mass from orbital motions is 3.7 (+-0.2) x 10^6 (Ro/8kpc)^3 Mo; this is a more direct measure of mass than those obtained from velocity dispersion measurements, which are as much as a factor of two smaller. The smallest closest approach is achieved by S0-16, which confines the mass to within a radius of a mere 45 AU and increases the inferred dark mass density by four orders of magnitude compared to earlier analyses based on velocity and acceleration vectors, making the Milky Way the strongest existing case by far for a supermassive black hole at the center of any normal type galaxy. The stellar orbital properties suggest that the distributions of eccentricities and angular momentum vector and apoapse directions are consistent with those of an isotropic system. Therefore many of the mechanisms proposed for the formation of young stars in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, such as formation from a pre-existing disk, are unlikely solutions for the Sgr A* cluster stars. Unfortunately, all existing alternative theories are also somewhat problematic. Understanding the apparent youth of stars in the Sgr A* cluster, as well as the more distant He I emission line stars, has now become one of the major outstanding issues in the study of the Galactic Center.
We analyze deep near-IR adaptive optics imaging as well as new proper motion data of the nuclear star cluster of the Milky Way. The surface density distribution of faint stars peaks within 0.2 of the black hole candidate SgrA*. The radial density distribution of this stellar cusp follows a power law of exponent 1.3-1.4. The K-band luminosity function of the overall nuclear stellar cluster (within 9 of SgrA*) resembles that of the large scale, Galactic bulge, but shows an excess of stars at K<14. We find that most of the massive early type stars at distances 1-10 from SgrA* are located in two rotating and geometrically thin disks. These disks are inclined at large angles and counter-rotate with respect to each other. Their stellar content is essentially the same, indicating that they formed at the same time. The star closest to SgrA* in 2002, S2, exhibits a 3.8 micron excess. We propose that the mid-IR emission either comes from the accretion flow around the black hole itself, or from dust in the accretion flow that is heated by the ultra-violet emission of S2.
We present the results of 16 years of monitoring stellar orbits around the massive black hole in center of the Milky Way using high resolution NIR 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 microarcsecond, 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 allow 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 times better than in previous studies. The central object mass is (4.31 +- 0.06|stat +- 0.36|R0) * 10^6 M_sun where the fractional statistical error of 1.5 percent is nearly independent from R0 and the main uncertainty is due to the uncertainty in R0. Our current best estimate for the distance to the Galactic Center is R0 = 8.33 +- 0.35 kpc. The dominant errors in this value is systematic. The mass scales with distance as (3.95 +- 0.06) * 10^6 M_sun * (R0/8kpc)^2.19. 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.
We present 1-resolution ALMA observations of the circumnuclear disk (CND) and the environment around SgrA*. The images unveil the presence of small spatial scale CO (J=3-2) molecular cloudlets within the central pc of the Milky Way, moving at high speeds, up to 300 km/s along the line-of-sight. The CO-emitting structures show intricate morphologies: extended and filamentary at high negative-velocities (v_LSR < -150 km/s), more localized and clumpy at extreme positive-velocities (v_LSR > +200 km/s). Based on the pencil-beam CO absorption spectrum toward SgrA* synchrotron emission, we also present evidence for a diffuse gas component producing absorption features at more extreme negative-velocities (v_LSR < -200 km/s). The CND shows a clumpy spatial distribution. Its motion requires a bundle of non-uniformly rotating streams of slightly different inclinations. The inferred gas density peaks are lower than the local Roche limit. This supports that CND molecular cores are transient. We apply the two standard orbit models, spirals vs. ellipses, invoked to explain the kinematics of the ionized gas streamers around SgrA*. The location and velocities of the CO cloudlets are inconsistent with the spiral model, and only two of them are consistent with the Keplerian ellipse model. Most cloudlets, however, show similar velocities that are incompatible with the motions of the ionized streamers or with gas bounded to the central gravity. We speculate that they are leftovers of more massive, tidally disrupted, clouds that fall into the cavity, or that they originate from instabilities in the inner rim of the CND and infall from there. Molecular cloudlets, all together with a mass of several 10 M_Sun, exist around SgrA*. Most of them must be short-lived: photoevaporated by the intense stellar radiation field, blown away by winds from massive stars, or disrupted by strong gravitational shears.
Searching for space-time variations of the constants of Nature is a promising way to search for new physics beyond General Relativity and the standard model motivated by unification theories and models of dark matter and dark energy. We propose a new way to search for a variation of the fine-structure constant using measurements of late-type evolved giant stars from the S-star cluster orbiting the supermassive black hole in our Galactic Center. A measurement of the difference between distinct absorption lines (with different sensitivity to the fine structure constant) from a star leads to a direct estimate of a variation of the fine structure constant between the stars location and Earth. Using spectroscopic measurements of 5 stars, we obtain a constraint on the relative variation of the fine structure constant below $10^{-5}$. This is the first time a varying constant of Nature is searched for around a black hole and in a high gravitational potential. This analysis shows new ways the monitoring of stars in the Galactic Center can be used to probe fundamental physics.
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