Gongjie Li and Abraham Loeb on SgrA*

arXiv

There is a very active star heating process going on at the center of the Milky Way. Li et al. calculate that in a million or so encounters, between stars going almost at the speed of light, and the super massive black hole that rules our galaxy, these stars accumulate enough heat to be destroyed. The accumulated heating may explain the lack of massive (& 10M⊙) S-stars closer than several tens of AU from SgrA*.

The title of the article is:

"Accumulated Tidal Heating of Stars Over Multiple Pericenter Passages Near SgrA*"

Some of these stars take only one year to go around SgrA*. As comparison, our Sun takes 250 million years for the same round trip.

Life as we know it, cannot happen there.

From the left figure, Li and Loeb conclude, that a 20 solar mass star, cannot survive millions of approaches to the super massive  black hole, if it is closer than seven times the tidal radius. That will be the zone which is green, yellow or red, to the right of that figure.