Intermediate‐Mass Black Hole(s) and Stellar Orbits in the Galactic Center

Abstract

Many young stars reside within the central half-parsec from Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole in the Galactic center. The origin of these stars remains a puzzle. Recently, Hansen & Milosavljevic (HM) have argued that an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) could have delivered the young stars to the immediate vicinity of Sgr A*. Here we focus on the final stages of the HM scenario. Namely, we integrate numerically the orbits of stars that are initially bound to the IMBH but are stripped from it by the tidal field of Sgr A*. Our numerical algorithm is a symplectic integrator designed specifically for the problem at hand; however, we have checked our results with SYMBA, a version of the widely available SWIFT code. We find that the distribution of the postinspiral orbital parameters is sensitive to the eccentricity of the inspiraling IMBH. If the IMBH is on a circular orbit, then the inclinations of numerically computed orbits relative to the inspiral plane are almost always smaller than 10°, and therefore (1) the simulations are in good agreement with the observed motions of stars in a clockwise-moving stellar disk; and (2) the simulations never reproduce the orbits of stars outside this disk, which include those in the second thick ring of stars and the randomly oriented unrelaxed orbits of some of the S stars. If the IMBH's orbital eccentricity is e = 0.6, then approximately half of the stars end up with orbital inclinations below 10°, and another half have inclinations anywhere between 0° and 180°; this is somewhat closer to what is observed. We also show that if the IRS 13 cluster is bound by an IMBH, as has been argued by Maillard et al., then the same IMBH could not have delivered all of the young stars to their present location.