Ruth A. Murray-Clay, Abraham Loeb
Recently, Gillessen et al. discovered an ionized cloud of gas plunging toward
the supermassive black hole, SgrA*, at the centre of the Milky Way. The cloud
is being tidally disrupted along its path to closest approach at ~3100
Schwarzschild radii from the black hole. Here, we show that this cloud of gas
naturally originates from a proto-planetary disk surrounding a low-mass star,
which was scattered a century ago from the observed ring of young stars
orbiting Sgr A*. As the young star approaches the black hole, its disk
experiences both photo-evaporation and tidal disruption, producing a cloud with
the observed properties. Our model implies that planets form in the Galactic
centre, and that tidal debris from proto-planetary disks can flag low mass
stars which are otherwise too faint to be detected.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4822
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