The Impact of Stellar Collisions in the Galactic Center

0481703 - ASÚ 2018 RIV US eng C - Conference Paper (international conference)
Davies, M.B. - Church, R.P. - Malmberg, D. - Nzoke, S. - Dale, James E. - Freitag, M.
The Impact of Stellar Collisions in the Galactic Center.
Galactic Center: A Window to the Nuclear Environment of Disk Galaxies. San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2011, s. 212-221. ASP Conference Series, 439. ISBN 9781583817582.
[Galactic Center: A Window to the Nuclear Environment of Disk Galaxies. Shanghai (CN), 19.10.2009-23.10.2009]
R&D Projects: GA MŠMT(CZ) LC06014
Institutional research plan: CEZ:AV0Z10030501
Keywords : supermassive black-holes * initial mass function * galaxy
OECD category: Astronomy (including astrophysics,space science)

We consider whether stellar collisions can explain the observed depletion of red giants in the Galactic center. We model the stellar population with two different IMFs: 1) the Miller-Scalo and 2) a much flatter IMF. In the former case, low-mass main-sequence stars dominate the population, and collisions are unable to remove red giants out to 0.4 pc although brighter red giants much closer in may be depleted via collisions with stellar-mass black holes. For a much flatter IMF, the stellar population is dominated by compact
remnants (i.e. black holes, white dwarfs and neutron stars). The most common collisions are then those between main-sequence stars and compact remnants. Such encounters are likely to destroy the main-sequence stars and thus prevent their evolution into red giants. In this way, the red-giant population could be depleted out to 0.4 pc matching observations. If this is the case, it implies the Galactic center contains a much larger population of stellar-mass black holes than would be expected from a regular IMF. This may in turn have implications for the formation and growth of the central supermassive black hole.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0277216