Pith. sign in

REVIEW 2 cited by

A rapid evolving region in the Galactic Center: Why S-stars thermalize and more massive stars are missing

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 1401.6456 v2 pith:H5SEFJ3K submitted 2014-01-24 astro-ph.GA

A rapid evolving region in the Galactic Center: Why S-stars thermalize and more massive stars are missing

classification astro-ph.GA
keywords massivestarsdiskeccentricitiesregions-starssgracenter
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

The existence of "S-stars" within a distance of 1" from SgrA$^*$ contradicts our understanding of star formation, due to the forbiddingly violent environment. A suggested possibility is that they form far and have been brought in by some fast dynamical process, since they are young. Nonetheless, all conjectured mechanisms either fail to reproduce their eccentricities --without violating their young age-- or cannot explain the problem of "inverse mass segregation": The fact that lighter stars (the S-stars) are closer to SgrA$^*$ and more massive ones, Wolf-Rayet (WR) and O-stars, are farther out. In this Letter we propose that the responsible for both, the distribution of the eccentricities and the paucity of massive stars, is the Kozai-Lidov-{\em like} resonance induced by a sub-parsec disk recently discovered in the Galactic center. Considering that the disk probably extended to smaller radius in the past, we show that in as short as (a few) $10^6$ years, the stars populating the innermost 1" region would redistribute in angular-momentum space and recover the observed "super-thermal" distribution. Meanwhile, WR and O-stars in the same region intermittently attain ample eccentricities that will lead to their tidal disruptions by the central massive black hole. Our results provide new evidences that SgrA$^*$ was powered several millions years ago by an accretion disk as well as by tidal stellar disruptions.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Binary disruptions driven by massive disks around massive black holes

    astro-ph.GA 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Disk torques can drive stellar binaries around a massive black hole to tidal disruption, and the Milky Way's young stellar disk likely caused ~10^2 such events ~5 Myr ago.

  2. Unveiling the properties of galaxy cores excavated by supermassive black hole binaries with SHARP

    astro-ph.GA 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Next-generation IFU instruments could detect core scouring and tangential anisotropy from MBH binaries up to z~0.14 for ~150 pc cores and higher redshifts for larger cores, expanding searchable volume by 30-40 times i...