posted on 2024-07-09, 15:39authored byM. Lang, K. Holley-Bockelmann, T. Bogdanović, P. Amaro-Seoane, A. Sesana, Manodeep Sinha
Observations of the Galactic Centre (GC) have accumulated a multitude of 'forensic' evidence indicating that several million years ago the centre of the MilkyWay galaxy was teeming with star formation and accretion-powered activity - this paints a rather different picture from the GC as we understand it today. We examine a possibility that this epoch of activity could have been triggered by the infall of a satellite galaxy into the MilkyWay which began at the redshift of z = 8 and ended a few million years ago with a merger of the Galactic supermassive black hole with an intermediate-mass black hole brought in by the inspiralling satellite.