IRS 16SW - A New Comoving Group of Young Stars in the Central Parsec of the Milky Way

Abstract

One of the most perplexing problems associated with the supermassive black hole at the center of our Galaxy is the origin of the young stars in its close vicinity. Using proper motion measurements and stellar number density counts based on 9 years of diffraction-limited K(2.2 micron)-band speckle imaging at the W. M. Keck 10-meter telescopes, we have identified a new comoving group of stars, which we call the IRS 16SW comoving group, located 1.9" (0.08 pc, in projection) from the central black hole. Four of the five members of this comoving group have been spectroscopically identified as massive young stars, specifically He I emission-line stars and OBN stars. This is the second young comoving group within the central parsec of the Milky Way to be recognized and is the closest, by a factor of 2, in projection to the central black hole. These comoving groups may be the surviving cores of massive infalling star clusters that are undergoing disruption in the strong tidal field of the central supermassive black hole.

arXiv comment10 pages, 1 figure, accepted for ApJL, uses emulateapj

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Cited by in corpus (22)

• The Two Young Star Disks in the Central Parsec of the Galaxy: Properties, Dynamics and Formation
• A Disk of Young Stars at the Galactic Center as Determined by Individual Stellar Orbits
• Stellar Populations in the Central 0.5 pc of the Galaxy II: The Initial Mass Function
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• Testing General Relativity with stellar orbits around the supermassive black hole in our Galactic center
• Stellar remnants in galactic nuclei: mass segregation
• Properties of the Remnant Clockwise Disk of Young Stars in the Galactic Center
• The ecology of star clusters and intermediate mass black holes in the Galactic bulge
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• The evolution of very massive stars
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• Evolution of Collisionally Merged Massive Stars
• GC-IRS13E - A puzzling association of three early-type stars
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• Consistency of the Infrared Variability of Sgr A* over 22 years
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• Composition of the galactic center star cluster: Population analysis from adaptive optics narrow band spectral energy distributions