Image Details
Caption: Figure 4.
We plot the final vs. initial eccentricities for the stars on unbound orbits for the first and second rows in Figure 2. Both the initial and final eccentricities are clustered near 1, with the initial eccentricities slightly under this value and the final eccentricities above. The diamonds are color coded by the speed at infinity of the unbound stars, whose distributions are shown in the histograms. We note that this calculation does not take into account any additional contribution to the potential, such as the stellar cluster, beyond the mass of the SMBH. Typical ﹩{v}_{\inf }﹩ are of order 100 km s−1.
© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.