Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter Stellar

Friday, 25 September 2020, 12:32   (virtual room M)

Large-scale proper motion study of the Galactic Centre

Banafsheh Shahzamanian, Rainer Schoedel
Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía - CSIC

Stellar proper motion studies in the centre of the Milky Way have been typically limited to the Quintuplet, Arches, and central parsec clusters. In this talk, I will present the primary results of a large-scale proper motion study of the central ~ 36' x16' of the Galaxy based on our GALACTICNUCLEUS survey (epoch 2015) combined with the HST Paschen-alpha survey (epoch 2008). This region of our Galaxy is not covered sufficiently by the existing astronomical surveys such as Gaia due to the high extinction (Av > 30 mag). Proper motions can help us to disentangle different structures (Galactic bulge, nuclear stellar disk, nuclear stellar cluster) of the Galactic Centre (GC) to be able to study their properties. They also enable us to identify and characterise so far undiscovered young clusters as co-moving groups to constrain recent star formation at the GC. We have discovered the first co-moving group of stars associated with an HII region that can show the presence of a dissolving young cluster.