Reconstruction of Stellar Orbits Close to Sagittarius A*: Possibilities for Testing General Relativity

Abstract

We have reconstructed possible orbits for a collection of stars located within 0.5 arcsec of Sgr A*. These orbits are constrained by observed stellar positions and angular proper motions. The construction of such orbits serves as a baseline from which to search for possible deviations due to the unseen mass distribution in the central 1000 AU of the Galaxy. We also discuss the likelihood that some of these stars may eventually exhibit detectable relativistic effects, allowing for interesting tests of general relativity around the 2.6 x 10^6 solar mass central object.

20 pages, 5 figures submitted to Astrophysical Journal, substantial changes and additions based on referee's comments

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• Dark matter concentration in the galactic center
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Cited by in corpus (35)

• Measuring Distance and Properties of the Milky Way's Central Supermassive Black Hole with Stellar Orbits
• The Galactic Center Massive Black Hole and Nuclear Star Cluster
• Stellar Orbits Around the Galactic Center Black Hole
• SINFONI in the Galactic Center: young stars and IR flares in the central light month
• Stellar Processes Near the Massive Black Hole in the Galactic Center
• Testing General Relativity with stellar orbits around the supermassive black hole in our Galactic center
• Testing the general relativistic ''no-hair'' theorems using the galactic center black hole SgrA*
• Improving Galactic Center Astrometry by Reducing the Effects of Geometric Distortion
• Testing Properties of the Galactic Center Black Hole Using Stellar Orbits
• Stellar Orbits Near Sagittarius A*
• Stellar Dynamics at the Galactic Center with an Extremely Large Telescope
• Precise analytic treatment of Kerr and Kerr-(anti) de Sitter black holes as gravitational lenses
• The nuclear cluster of the Milky Way: Our primary testbed for the interaction of a dense star cluster with a massive black hole
• Perturbed stellar motions around the rotating black hole in Sgr A* for a generic orientation of its spin axis
• General relativistic effects on the orbit of the S2 star with GRAVITY
• Scalar field effects on the orbit of S2 star
• Pinpointing the near-infrared location of Sgr A* by correcting optical distortion in the NACO imager
• Testing the black hole no-hair theorem at the galactic center: Perturbing effects of stars in the surrounding cluster
• On post-Newtonian orbits and the Galactic-center stars
• On Testing the Kerr Metric of the Massive Black Hole in the Galactic Center via Stellar Orbital Motion: Full General Relativistic Treatment
• Sgr A${}^{\ast }$: a laboratory to measure the central black hole and cluster parameters
• On Relativistic Corrections to Microlensing Effects: Applications to the Galactic Black Hole
• Long-term classical and general relativistic effects on the radial velocities of the stars orbiting Sgr A*
• Weighing the cusp at the Galactic Centre
• A Hybrid N-Body Code Incorporating Algorithmic Regularization and Post-Newtonian Forces
• What stellar orbit is needed to measure the spin of the Galactic center black hole from astrometric data?
• Relativistic redshift effects and the Galactic-center stars
• Prospects for constraining the spin of the massive black hole at the Galactic center via the relativistic motion of a surrounding star
• The Klein-Gordon-Fock equation in the curved spacetime of the Kerr-Newman (anti) de Sitter black hole
• Gravitational redshift/blueshift of light emitted by geodesic test particles, frame-dragging and pericentre-shift effects, in the Kerr-Newman-de Sitter and Kerr-Newman black hole geometries
• The Galactic Center as a laboratory for theories of gravity and dark matter
• Frame-dragging and the kinematics of Galactic-Center stars
• On the Newtonian and Spin-induced Perturbations felt by the Stars Orbiting around the Massive Black Hole in the Galactic Center
• Expansion-induced contribution to the precession of binary orbits
• Pinpointing the massive black hole in the Galactic Center with gravitationally lensed stars