Relativistic redshift of the star S0-2 orbiting the Galactic center supermassive black hole
astro-ph.GA
/ Authors
Tuan Do, Aurelien Hees, Andrea Ghez, Gregory D. Martinez, Devin S. Chu, Siyao Jia, Shoko Sakai, Jessica R. Lu, Abhimat K. Gautam, Kelly Kosmo O'Neil
and 19 more authors
Eric E. Becklin, Mark R. Morris, Keith Matthews, Shogo Nishiyama, Randy Campbell, Samantha Chappell, Zhuo Chen, Anna Ciurlo, Arezu Dehghanfar, Eulalia Gallego-Cano, Wolfgang E. Kerzendorf, James E. Lyke, Smadar Naoz, Hiromi Saida, Rainer Schödel, Masaaki Takahashi, Yohsuke Takamori, Gunther Witzel, Peter Wizinowich
/ Abstract
General Relativity predicts that a star passing close to a supermassive black hole should exhibit a relativistic redshift. We test this using observations of the Galactic center star S0-2. We combine existing spectroscopic and astrometric measurements from 1995-2017, which cover S0-2's 16-year orbit, with measurements in 2018 March to September which cover three events during its closest approach to the black hole. We detect the combination of special relativistic- and gravitational-redshift, quantified using a redshift parameter, $Υ$. Our result, $Υ=0.88 \pm 0.17$, is consistent with General Relativity ($Υ=1$) and excludes a Newtonian model ($Υ=0$ ) with a statistical significance of 5 $σ$.