"Ice cubes" in the center of the Milky Way - Water ice and hydrocarbons in the central parsec

TL;DR

This study maps water ice and hydrocarbon distribution in the Galactic Center's central parsec using L-band spectroscopy, revealing local cold environments and contributing to understanding galactic nuclei environments.

Contribution

First to create a detailed L-band spectral data cube of the Galactic Center's central parsec, mapping water ices and hydrocarbons in this region.

Findings

Residual absorption indicates local water ices and hydrocarbons.

Features suggest very low temperatures below 80K.

Supports presence of local CO ices in the central parsec.

Abstract

The close environment of the central supermassive black hole of our Galaxy is studied thoroughly since decades in order to shed light on the behavior of the central regions of galaxies in general and of active galaxies in particular. The Galactic Center has shown a wealth of structures on different scales with a complicated mixture of early- and late-type stars, ionized and molecular gas, dust and winds. Here we aim at studying the distribution of water ices and hydrocarbons in the central parsec as well as along the line of sight. This study is made possible thanks to L-band spectroscopy. This spectral band, from 2.8 to 4.2$\mu m$, hosts important signatures of the circumstellar medium and interstellar dense and diffuse media among which deep absorption features are attributed to water ices and hydrocarbons. We observed the Galactic Center in the L-band of ISAAC spectrograph located on UT1/VLT ESO telescope. By mapping the central half parsec using 27 slit positions, we were able to build the first data cube of the region in this wavelength domain. Thanks to a calibrator spectrum of the foreground extinction in the L-band derived in a previous paper, we corrected our data cube for the line of sight extinction and validated our calibrator spectrum. The data show that a residual absorption due to water ices and hydrocarbons is present in the corrected data cube. This suggests that the features are produced in the local environment of the Galactic center implying very low temperatures well below 80K. This is in agreement with our finding of local CO ices in the central parsec described in Moultaka et al. (2015).