Making Bright Giants Invisible At The Galactic Centre
Pau Amaro-Seoane, Xian Chen, Rainer Sch\"odel, Jordi Casanellas

TL;DR
This paper proposes that the apparent lack of bright giants near the Galactic Center is due to their atmospheres being stripped by dense stellar disc regions, causing them to become faint or invisible.
Contribution
It introduces a stellar evolution model showing how envelope stripping shortens the giant phase, explaining the observed core-like distribution of bright stars at the GC.
Findings
Red giants are rapidly stripped of their atmospheres in dense disc regions.
Envelope stripping causes giants to quickly become white dwarfs, explaining their invisibility.
The non-linearity factor depends on local physical conditions and clump properties.
Abstract
Current observations of the Galactic Center (GC) seem to display a core-like distribution of bright stars from inwards. On the other hand, we observe young, massive stars at the GC, with roughly 20-50\% of them in a disc, mostly in the region where the bright giants appear to be lacking. In a previous publication we put the idea forward that the missing stars are deeply connected to the presence of this disc. The progenitor of the stellar disc is very likely to have been a gaseous disc that at some point fragmented and triggered star formation. This caused the appearance of overdensity regions in the disc that had high enough densities to ensure stripping large giants of their atmospheres and thus rendering them very faint. In this paper we use a stellar evolution code to derive the properties that a red giant would display in a colour-magnitude diagram, as well as a…
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