Detection of a new object close to Sgr A*
ATel #13794; Florian Peissker, Andreas Eckart, Nadeen B. Sabha, Michal Zajacek, Harshitha Bhat
on 9 Jun 2020; 07:23 UT
Credential Certification: Florian Peissker (peissker@ph1.uni-koeln.de)
Subjects: Infra-Red, A Comment
We report the detection of a newly discovered object very close to the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the center of our galaxy, Sgr A*. This filament with a projected on-sky distance of ~100-250 mas moves with a proper motion of around 320 km/s away from Sgr A*. It covers a broad area from north to south along the field of view. We observe this object throughout all data-sets between 2005 and 2018 in the SINFONI (VLT, Chile) 3d cubes but also in our VISIR data (VLT, Chile). The Br\gamma-line is the most prominent emission and can be observed with SINFONI (near-infrared). This line is associated with ionized gas and can be used as a tracer for stellar winds. In the mid-infrared (PAH1, VISIR), we also detect this dusty filament in every available data set at the position of the Br\gamma emission. We derive a lower mass of about 2.5 x 10^-5 M_solar. Several individual clumps can be observed that could indicate shocks from the stellar winds that are created by the S-cluster members.
Besides the prominent north-south Br\gamma bar feature, we observe several other gas reservoirs that can be compared to the reported object. A similar filament that is almost perpendicular to the Br\gamma bar can be observed west (projected) of Sgr A*.
The paper is accepted. A preprint is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03648
