Lecture on Apr. 23rd, 2019

The Galactic Center region: Tracing the young and old population

Speaker: Mathias Schultheis

Venue: SWIFAR Building

Time: 2:00 PM, Tuesday, 23rd April, 2019

Abstract: 

The Galactic Center region with its surrounding massive black hole exhibits extreme conditions and is an ideal laboratory to study stellar populations in extreme environment. Thanks to the new highly sensitive IR spectrographs (CRIRES/VLT and Nirspec/Keck) it is possible to derive the chemical abundances of late-type stars close to the GC.

Due to the extreme conditions, star formation is different in the GC compared to the galactic disc. I will describe here the approach to get accurate star formation rates by using KMOS (VLT) spectra to trace massive YSOs.

The Nuclear Star Cluster in the Milky Way is the only one we can study in detail, and as a benchmark object for large spiral galaxies, it provides a vital link to theories of galaxy evolution in general. This makes it very special and fundamental to explore. In many ways, an extreme environment and embedding the super-massive black hole, the Nuclear Star Cluster lies at the center of the Milky Way and extends a few 10 light-years across. With high-IR facilities, it is possible to get details chemical abundances of late-type giants very close to the supermassive black hole but it is also possible to trace the young stellar population in the Nuclear Star cluster. I will discuss here our latest results.