The Impact of Stellar Collisions in the Galactic Center
1.
SYSNO ASEP
0481703
Document Type
C - Proceedings Paper (int. conf.)
R&D Document Type
Conference Paper
Title
The Impact of Stellar Collisions in the Galactic Center
Author(s)
Davies, M.B. (SE) Church, R.P. (SE) Malmberg, D. (SE) Nzoke, S. (SE) Dale, James E. (ASU-R) Freitag, M. (CH)
Source Title
Galactic Center: A Window to the Nuclear Environment of Disk Galaxies. - San Francisco : Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2011
- ISBN 9781583817582
Pages
s. 212-221
Number of pages
10 s.
Publication form
Print - P
Action
Galactic Center: A Window to the Nuclear Environment of Disk Galaxies
Event date
19.10.2009 - 23.10.2009
VEvent location
Shanghai
Country
CN - China
Event type
WRD
Language
eng - English
Country
US - United States
Keywords
supermassive black-holes ; initial mass function ; galaxy
Subject RIV
BN - Astronomy, Celestial Mechanics, Astrophysics
OECD category
Astronomy (including astrophysics,space science)
R&D Projects
LC06014 GA MŠMT - Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS)
CEZ
AV0Z10030501 - ASU-R (2005-2011)
UT WOS
000291890200040
Annotation
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.
