A Stream of Hypervelocity Stars from the Galactic Center
Abstract
Recent observations have found a 1700 km s-1 star [S5-HVS1] that was ejected from the Galactic center approximately five million years ago. This star was likely produced by the 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 distributions.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- DOI:
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2005.10267
- Bibcode:
- 2020ApJ...904..118G
- Keywords:
-
- Hypervelocity stars;
- Galactic center;
- Binary stars;
- 776;
- 565;
- 154;
- Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies
- E-Print:
- 7 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)