2023MNRAS.526.1471F

Stars evolving around a supermassive black hole see their orbital orientations diffuse efficiently, a process called 'vector resonant relaxation'. In particular, stars within the same disc, i.e. neighbours in orientations, will slowly diffuse away from one another through this stochastic process. We use jointly (i) detailed kinetic predictions for the efficiency of this dilution and (ii) the recent observation of a stellar disc around SgrA*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, to constrain SgrA*'s unobserved stellar cluster. Notably, we investigate quantitatively the impact of a population of intermediate-mass black holes on the survivability of the stellar disc.