TAPIR Seminar

The Milky Way's own supermassive black hole SgrA* is our best hope for studying black holes' immediate environments and their growth.  There is a wide variety of accretion models, but we only know with certainty that the amount of the material around SgrA* is small and its accretion is low.  I will report the first detection of the 10⁴ K ionized disk within a radius of 0.008 pc from the black hole in H30alpha (n=31 -> 30) recombination line of Hydrogen on ALMA.  I will discuss the disk properties, its dynamics and how it will help improve our understanding of black hole accretion.  I will also talk about the close flyby of the S2 star by the Galactic Center happening right now and what it will teach us about the Galactic Center environment.