A stream of hypervelocity stars from the Galactic Center

Abstract

Recent observations have found a 1700 km/s star [S5-HVS1] that was ejected from the Galactic Center approximately five million years ago. This star was likely produced by tidal disruption of a binary. In particular, the Galactic Center contains a few million year old stellar disk that could excite binaries to nearly radial orbits via a secular gravitational instability. Such binaries would be disrupted by the central supermassive black hole, and would also explain the observed cluster of B stars ~0.01 pc from the Galactic Center. In this paper we predict S5-HVS1 is part of a larger stream, and use observationally motivated N-body simulations to predict its spatial and velocity distribution.

arXiv comment7 pages, 3 figures. Accepted to ApJ (Main Journal). Version 2 includes corrections to Figure 1 described in an erratum (Aleksey Generozov 2021 ApJ 906 136)

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• Forming Young and Hypervelocity Stars in the Galactic Centre via Tidal Disruption of a Molecular Cloud
• Searching for new Hypervelocity Stars with Gaia DR3 and VLT/FORS2 Spectroscopy