Paper detail

The coupling of a young stellar disc with the molecular torus in the Galactic centre

The Galactic centre hosts, according to observations, a number of early-type stars. About one half of those which are orbiting the central supermassive black hole on orbits with projected radii $\gtrsim$ 0.03 pc form a coherently rotating disc. Observations further reveal a massive gaseous torus and a significant population of late-type stars. In this paper, we investigate, by means of numerical N-body computations, the orbital evolution of the stellar disc, which we consider to be initially thin. We include the gravitational influence of both the torus and the late-type stars, as well as the self-gravity of the disc. Our results show that, for a significant set of system parameters, the evolution of the disc leads, within the lifetime of the early-type stars, to a configuration compatible with the observations. In particular, the disc naturally reaches a specific - perpendicular - orientation with respect to the torus, which is indeed the configuration observed in the Galactic centre. We, therefore, suggest that all the early-type stars may have been born within a single gaseous disc.