The Hills Mechanism and the Galactic Center S-stars

Recent observations have found a hypervelocity star that was ejected from the Galactic center 5 Myr ago. The observed properties of this star strongly suggest it originated in an observed disk of young stars at a galactocentric distance of ~0.1 pc. In particular, this star may have started in a binary pair that was pushed to tidal disruption via a secular dynamical instability in its parent disk. The former companions of such stars likely make up the observed S-star cluster. In this talk I will discuss (i) how binaries in the disk can be pushed towards disruption, (ii) how the semimajor axis distribution of the S-stars can be reproduced with a physically motivated binary population, and (iii) how relaxation from a realistic stellar population can reproduce the observed eccentricity distribution of S-stars.