Speaker
Description
The centre of the Milky Way has been subject of an intense observational program throughout the last thirty years, leading to exhibit the existence of a point source supermassive object named Sagittarius A (Sgr A). While stars orbiting around it are accelerated by gravity up to speeds of 10.000 km/s, Sgr A moves at less than 1 km/s. The kinematic properties of such stars, called S-stars, set up its mass to about 4 million solar masses, concentrated in a region of only six light hours. The study of the motion of these stars and the potential future discovery of pulsars orbiting Sgr A allows to probe the gravitational field of a supermassive black hole in a regime that had never been explored before. In this talk I will discuss the new avenue opened by such observations to test alternative to the classical Schwarzschild black hole model.
