Star-Disk Collisions in the Galactic Center

Recent observations of the Milky Way's Galactic Center (GC) have revealed a relative paucity of red giant stars surrounding the GC's supermassive black hole (SMBH). It has recently been suggested that these 'missing' red giants can be explained by the interaction of red giant stars with the accretion disk that is likely to have existed around the SMBH (Amaro-Seoane & Chen, 2014). The key idea is that red giant stars can be rendered unobservable if they lose a significant fraction of their tenuous stellar envelopes or are entirely disrupted in such collisions. We set out to test this theoretical prediction with hydrodynamical simulations of star-disk collisions.