Forming young and hypervelocity stars in the Galactic Centre via tidal disruption of a molecular cloud

Abstract

The Milky Way Galaxy hosts a four million solar mass black hole, Sgr A*, that underwent a major accretion episode approximately 3-6 Myr ago. During the episode, hundreds of young massive stars formed in a disc orbiting Sgr A* in the central half parsec. The recent discovery of a hypervelocity star S5-HVS1, ejected by Sgr A* five Myr ago with a velocity vector consistent with the disc, suggests that this event also produced binary star disruptions. The initial stellar disc has to be rather eccentric for this to occur. Such eccentric disks can form from the tidal disruptions of molecular clouds. Here we perform simulations of such disruptions, focusing on gas clouds on rather radial initial orbits. As a result, stars formed in our simulations are on very eccentric orbits ($\bar{e}\sim 0.6$) with a lopsided configuration. For some clouds counter-rotating stars are formed. As in previous work, we find that such discs undergo a secular gravitational instability that leads to a moderate number of particles obtaining eccentricities of 0.99 or greater, sufficient for stellar binary disruption. We also reproduce the mean eccentricity of the young disk in the Galactic centre, though not the observed surface density profile. We discuss missing physics and observational biases that may explain this discrepancy. We conclude that observed S-stars, hypervelocity stars, and disc stars tightly constrain the initial cloud parameters, indicating a cloud mass between a few× 104 and 105 M⊙, and a velocity between ∼40 and 80 km s−1 at 10 pc.

The Peak of the Fallback Rate from Tidal Disruption Events: Dependence on Stellar Type

“…For realistic stellar populations, typically, the heaviest surviving species dominates the relaxation rate, making mass segregation another important factor in the determination of TDE rates in galactic nuclei. Mass segregation occurs over a fraction of the two-body relaxation time, and causes more massive stellar objects to aggregate near the galactic nucleus while driving lighter objects to larger distances (e.g., Merritt 2013;Generozov et al 2022). For stellar distributions that include massive stars, e.g., the recent starbursts in E + A galaxies, mass segregation could be an additional factor that results in an overrepresentation of high-mass stars in the rates of observed TDEs.…”