Doppler Boosting of the S-stars in the Galactic Center

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the relativistic Doppler boosting effect on the brightness of S-stars near the Galactic Center's black hole, showing it can cause significant photometric variability and should be considered in observational studies.

Contribution

It provides detailed calculations of Doppler boosting effects on S-stars, highlighting their potential for refining orbital parameters and probing the environment around Sgr A*.

Findings

Doppler boosting causes over 6% brightness variation in some S-stars.

The effect can help confirm orbital parameters despite noisy data.

Higher-order relativistic effects are difficult to detect photometrically.

Abstract

Astrometry and spectroscopy of the S-stars in the Galactic Center provide a unique way to probe the properties of the central supermassive black hole, as well as the post-Newtonian effects caused by its gravity, e.g. gravitational redshift and general relativistic precession. It has also been suggested that the photometry of S-stars can be used for studying the properties of gaseous environment of Sgr A$^*$. Due to the high velocities of the S-stars, sometimes approaching $~0.1c$, their photometric signal should be considerably affected by the Doppler boosting. We calculate this relativistic effect for several S-stars closely approaching the central black hole (most of them recently announced) and show that the amplitude of the photometric variability due to the Doppler boosting for some of them (S62 and S4714) exceeds $6\%$; for the well studied star S2 it is about $2\%$. Measurement of the Doppler boosting can confirm the existence and help refine orbital parameters of the S-stars with noisy spectroscopy and astrometry. This effect should be explicitly accounted for when the photometry of S-stars is used for probing the medium around the Sgr A$^*$. We discuss the observability of the Doppler boosting given the complications typical for the Galactic Center and conclude, in particular, that the purely photometric detection of the higher order relativistic corrections to the Doppler boosting signal (due to the gravitational redshift and transverse Doppler shift, which we also calculate) is hardly possible for the S-stars.