General relativistic effects on the orbit of the S2 star with GRAVITY

TL;DR

This paper explores how the GRAVITY instrument can detect various relativistic effects on the orbit of the S2 star near the black hole Sgr A*, including redshift, precession, and frame-dragging, to better understand black hole properties.

Contribution

It demonstrates that combined observations from GRAVITY and SINFONI can detect relativistic effects on S2's orbit within months to years, providing constraints on black hole spin without complex ray-tracing.

Findings

Detection of relativistic effects is feasible within a few months or years.

Constraints on Sgr A*'s angular momentum can reach 0.1 at 1σ confidence.

Long-term monitoring or discovery of closer stars enhances parameter constraints.

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to investigate the detection by GRAVITY of different relativistic effects affecting the astrometric and/or spectroscopic observations of S2 such as the transverse Doppler shift, the gravitational redshift, the pericenter advance and higher-order general relativistic (GR) effects, in particular the Lense-Thirring effect due to the angular momentum of the black hole. We showed that the combination of S2 observations obtained with the GRAVITY instrument and the spectrograph SINFONI (Spectrograph for INtegral Field Observations in the Near Infrared) also installed at the VLT (Very Large Telescope) will lead to the detection of various relativistic effects. Such detections will be possible with S2 monitorings obtained within a few months or years, depending on the effect. Strong constraints on the angular momentum of Sgr~A* (e.g., at $1\sigma~=~0.1$) with the S2 star will be possible with a simple stellar-orbit model without using a ray-tracing code but with approximating the gravitational lensing effect. However, long monitorings are necessary, and we thus must rely on the discovery of closer-in stars near Sgr~A* if we want to efficiently constrain the black hole parameters with stellar orbits in a short time, or monitor the flares if they orbit around the black hole.