Isolated massive stars in the Galactic center: The dynamic contribution from the Arches and Quintuplet star clusters

¹ Argelander Institut für Astronomie, Universität Bonn, Auf dem Hügel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany
e-mail: mhabibi@astro.uni-bonn.de; astolte@astro.uni-bonn.de
² Technische Universität Berlin, Zentrum für Astronomie und Astrophysik, Hardenbergstraße 36, 10623 Berlin, Germany
e-mail: harfst@astro.physik.tu-berlin.de
³ Member of the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne, Germany

Received: 11 November 2013
Accepted: 11 March 2014

Abstract

Recently, more than 100 Wolf-Rayet and OB stars were identified in the Galactic center. About a third of these sources are not spatially associated with any of the known star clusters in this region. We probe the distribution of drifted sources in numerical models of the massive clusters in the Galactic center and compare it to the observed distribution of isolated massive sources in this region. We find that stars as massive as 100 M_⊙ drift away from the center of each cluster by up to ~ 60 pc using the cluster models. Our best model reproduces ~ 60% of the known isolated massive stars out to 80 pc from the center of the Arches cluster. This number increases to 70–80% when we only consider the region that is ~ 20 pc from the Arches cluster.