The coupling of a young stellar disc with the molecular torus in the Galactic centre

Abstract

The Galactic centre hosts, according to observations, a number of early-type stars. About one half of those which are orbiting the central supermassive black hole on orbits with projected radii $\gtrsim$ 0.03 pc form a coherently rotating disc. Observations further reveal a massive gaseous torus and a significant population of late-type stars. In this paper, we investigate, by means of numerical N-body computations, the orbital evolution of the stellar disc, which we consider to be initially thin. We include the gravitational influence of both the torus and the late-type stars, as well as the self-gravity of the disc. Our results show that, for a significant set of system parameters, the evolution of the disc leads, within the lifetime of the early-type stars, to a configuration compatible with the observations. In particular, the disc naturally reaches a specific - perpendicular - orientation with respect to the torus, which is indeed the configuration observed in the Galactic centre. We, therefore, suggest that all the early-type stars may have been born within a single gaseous disc.

Accepted for publication in MNRAS; 9 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (6)

• The Two Young Star Disks in the Central Parsec of the Galaxy: Properties, Dynamics and Formation
• The structure of the nuclear stellar cluster of the Milky Way
• Simulations of the formation of stellar discs in the Galactic centre via cloud-cloud collisions
• Origin of the S Stars in the Galactic Center
• The High-Density Ionized Gas in the Central Parsec of the Galaxy
• Stellar dynamical evidence against a cold disc origin for stars in the Galactic Centre

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Stellar Populations in the Central 0.5 pc of the Galaxy II: The Initial Mass Function
• Properties of the Remnant Clockwise Disk of Young Stars in the Galactic Center
• Free motion around black holes with discs or rings: between integrability and chaos - II
• The Keplerian three-body encounter I. Insights on the origin of the S-stars and the G-objects in the Galactic center
• Modelling the formation of the circumnuclear ring in the Galactic centre
• Secular theory of the orbital evolution of the young stellar disc in the Galactic Centre
• Star Formation and Dynamics in the Galactic Centre
• Eccentric disc instability in stellar discs formed from inspiraling gas clouds in the Galactic Centre
• Perturbations induced by a molecular cloud on the young stellar disc in the Galactic Centre
• Two-body relaxation driven evolution of the young stellar disc in the Galactic Centre
• The properties of hypervelocity stars and S-stars originating from an eccentric disc around a supermassive black hole
• The influence of dense gas rings on the dynamics of a stellar disk in the Galactic center
• Short and long term evolution of a stellar disk around a massive black hole: The role of binaries, the cusp and stellar evolution