Massive Stars and The Creation of our Galactic Center

Abstract

Our Galactic Center hosts over 10% of the known massive stars in the Galaxy. The majority of these stars are located in three particularly massive clusters that formed within the past 5 Myr. While these clusters are extraordinary, their formation repesents about half of the total inferred star formation rate in the Galactic Center. There is mounting evidence that the clusters are just present-day examples of the hundreds of such similar clusters that must have been created in the past, and whose stars now comprise the bulk of all stars seen in the region. I discuss the massive stellar content in the Galactic Center and present a new analysis that suggests that effects of continuous star formation in the Galactic Center can be seen in the observed luminosity functions newly-obtained HST/NICMOS and Gemini AO data.

IAU 212

References in corpus (4)

• Massive Stars in the Arches Cluster
• Stellar Orbits Near Sagittarius A*
• Mass Function of the Arches Cluster from Gemini Adaptive Optics Data
• Proper motions of new dust in the colliding-wind binary WR 140

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The Two Young Star Disks in the Central Parsec of the Galaxy: Properties, Dynamics and Formation
• Stellar Processes Near the Massive Black Hole in the Galactic Center
• Massive perturber-driven interactions of stars with a massive black hole
• The High Time Resolution Universe Pulsar Survey -- XVIII. The reprocessing of the HTRU-S Low Lat survey around the Galactic centre using a Fast Folding Algorithm pipeline for accelerated pulsars
• Extreme Star Formation
• Satellite Infall and Mass Deposition on the Galactic Centre