Comparison between the expected ejection spectrum of the Hills mechanism and the SMBH–IMBH scenario. In the Hills (1988) case, we consider both stars with masses m₁ = m₂ = 1 M_⊙. The initial distribution of semimajor axes is taken to be log-uniform in the range 0.01–1 au, while the eccentricity distribution is taken to be thermal. In the SMBH–IMBH scenario, we take q = 10⁻⁴–10⁻³ and a/a_h = 0.1–1, which falls within the allowed parameter space of the putative IMBH in the Galactic Center (Merritt 2002). All distributions are normalized to unit area.