Program: GS-2019A-Q-130

Title:Star formation and dynamics at < 2.5 pc from Sgr A*
PI:Jorge Cuadra
Co-I(s): Frank Eisenhauer, Thomas Ott, Diego Calderón-Espinoza, Reinhard Genzel, Cristina Romero-Cañizales, Vincent Garrel, Juan Garrido, Stefan Gillessen, Patricia Arévalo, Oliver Pfuhl, Franz Bauer

Abstract

We propose to observe the Galactic Center's inner few parsecs using GSAOI. This field is characterised by the puzzling presence of young stars in the close vicinity of the massive black hole. The large field of view of GSAOI will allow us to dramatically increase the census of young stars, whose distribution and dynamics are crucial to understand their formation mechanism. Moreover, the comparison between this new data set and the VLT data will enable us to pin down systematic errors in the astrometry, which will translate into smaller uncertainties in determining the black hole mass and the distance to the Galactic Center. This is a resubmission of GS-2018A-Q-130 and other previuos proposals, that due to weather and technical downtime have yielded only <~ 1.5h of data.