Fig. 5.

Illustrative figure of the motion of S2 through the hot flow around Sgr A* of variable density. The density may change by as much as an order of magnitude from the apocentre to the pericentre, from several hundred particles per cubic centimetre to several thousand particles per cubic centimetre, respectively, depending on the power-law slope of the radial number density distribution. For the exemplary calculation, we used na = nB(r/rB)−1, where nB = 20.3 cm−3 is the particle density at the Bondi radius. The white circle in the bottom left corner depicts the L′-band point spread function corresponding to 8m-class telescopes, from which it is apparent that the S2 bow shock remains unresolved, especially close to the pericentre.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.