Stellar discs and intermediate-mass black holes in galactic nuclei – I. Fragmenting the disc in an isotropic stellar potential

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ID: 327090
2026
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Abstract
Abstract The origin of the complex orbital structure of young massive stars at the Galactic centre remains an open question. If these stars formed in a single episode from a gaseous accretion disc, they may initially have constituted a single, coherently rotating stellar disc. We investigate whether perturbations from an unseen intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) could fragment and/or disrupt such a disc into the multiple orbital components observed today. First, we derive a theoretical criterion for when and where the IMBH’s torque overcomes the disc’s self-torque and tears it apart. We then test this picture with direct N-body simulations of a stellar disc interacting with an inclined IMBH around a central supermassive black hole. We find that the outcome depends strongly on the IMBH’s orbit and mass. A prograde IMBH rapidly aligns with the stellar disc, while a massive retrograde IMBH (m• ≃ 0.67 Md) anti-aligns relative to the radially overlapping stars and efficiently fragments the original disc into three components in angular-momentum space: an inner disc, a misaligned overlapping region, and an unperturbed outer disc. The IMBH also excites eccentricities in the overlapping region, driving stars away from initially circular orbits. These features emerge for an IMBH mass of 2000 ⊙ and a disc mass of 3000 ⊙ within 10–20 Myr, a timescale comparable to the age of the young Galactic centre stellar population, and provide a plausible explanation for the observed multiple orbital planes, warped geometry, and broad eccentricity distribution.
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Authors Taras Panamarev, Xiang Zou, Bence Kocsis
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Journal monthly notices of the royal astronomical society
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/mnras/stag1637
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stag1637
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