Published September 22, 2022
| Version v1
Conference paper
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Young Stars in the Galactic Center
Authors/Creators
- 1. Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics & Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (starting 2022)
Description
The Galactic Center harbors a peculiar population of young stars some distributed in a clockwise rotating disk. In this talk I will present the largest spectroscopic survey of the Nuclear Star Cluster using over 600 hours of ESO's SINFONI instrument. The observations were carried out over the last two decades and now cover roughly 25 arc-seconds squared of the Galactic Center. This is a substantial increase in coverage compared to previous works. The analysis of the spectra has led to the spectroscopic classification of over 2800 stars.
We identified around 90 new young stars increasing the total number of known young stars by almost a factor two to ~200. Furthermore, I will show that these young stars are not isotropically distributed, but instead reside in a system consisting of a central warped clockwise disk and several streamers/ streams of young stars at larger radii. Lastly, I will discuss the implications of this result for star formation in the Galactic Center, where I will argue that the young stars formed after the collision and subsequent accretion of two giant molecular clouds about 6 mega years ago.