Nuclear Stellar Disk-like Nature in the Kinematics of SiO Maser Stars around Sagittarius A*

TL;DR

This study analyzes the kinematics of SiO maser stars near Sagittarius A* using ALMA data, revealing their association with the Nuclear Stellar Disk and suggesting non-random, disk-like motion patterns.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed kinematic analysis of SiO maser stars around Sgr A* using multi-epoch ALMA observations, highlighting their disk-like motion.

Findings

SiO maser stars tend to move along the Galactic plane.

Proper motions are larger than LSR velocities for many stars.

Many 3D velocities suggest membership in the Nuclear Stellar Disk.

Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of the kinematics of SiO maser stars around the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). We used the archive data in the SiO v=1, J=2-1 emission line obtained by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in 2017 and 2021 (#2016.1.00940.S, PI Darling, J. and #2019.1.00292.S, PI Paine, J.). We detected 37 SiO maser stars in the channel maps and derived their angular offsets relative to Sgr A* and LSR radial velocities. We derived the proper motions of 35 stars by comparing their angular offsets in the two epochs. The proper motions of Wolf-Rayet and O star in the Nuclear Star Cluster (NSC) are reported to be rather random, except for the co-moving clusters IRS13E and IRS13N (Tsuboi et al. 2022). However, the derived proper motions of SiO maser stars do not look completely random. The proper motions of the SiO maser stars show a tendency to lie along the Galactic plane. The proper motion amplitudes of SiO maser stars are larger than the LSR velocity amplitudes. We estimated the 3D motions from the proper motions and LSR velocities. Many 3D velocities are near to or larger than the upper limit velocities for Kepler orbits around Sgr A*, whose mass is assumed to be 4x10^6 Msun. These indicate that the SiO maser stars around Sgr A* are members of the Nuclear Stellar Disk rather than the NSC.