Paper: astro-ph/0512621

Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2005 18:24:40 GMT (91kb)

Title: Astrometric Monitoring of Stellar Orbits at the Galactic Center with a
Next Generation Large Telescope

Authors: Nevin N. Weinberg (1, 2), Milos Milosavljevic (1), Andrea M. Ghez (3)
((1) Caltech, (2) KITP, (3) UCLA)

Comments: 8 pages, 3 figures. ASP Conf. Series "Astrometry in the Age of the
Next Generation of Large Telescopes", 2005, v.338, eds. P. Kenneth Seidelmann
and Alice K. B. Monet

Journal-ref: ASP Conf. Proc. 338 (2005) 252
\\
We show that with a Next Generation Large Telescope one can detect the
accelerated motions of ~100 stars orbiting the massive black hole at the
Galactic center. The positions and velocities of these stars will be measured
to astrometric and spectroscopic precision several times better than currently
attainable enabling detailed measurements of the gravitational potential in the
neighborhood of the massive black hole. We show that the monitoring of stellar
motions with such a telescopes enables: (1) a measurement of the Galactic
center distance R_0 to better than 0.1% accuracy, (2) a measurement of the
extended matter distribution near the black hole, including that of the exotic
dark matter, (3) a detection of general relativistic effects due to the black
hole including the prograde precession of stars and possibly the black hole
spin, and (4) a detection of gravitational encounters between monitored stars
and stellar remnants that accumulate near the Galactic center. Such encounters
probe the mass function of the remnants.

\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512621 , 91kb)