The Disruption of Stellar Clusters Containing Massive Black Holes near the Galactic Center

We present results from dynamical Monte Carlo simulations of dense starclusters near the Galactic center. These clusters sink toward the center of theGalaxy by dynamical friction. During their inspiral, they may undergo corecollapse and form an intermediate-mass black hole through runaway collisions.Such a cluster can then reach within a parsec of the Galactic center before itcompletely disrupts, releasing many young stars in this region. This scenarioprovides a natural explanation for the presence of the young stars observednear the Galactic center. Here we determine the initial conditions for thisscenario to work and we derive the mass distribution of cluster stars as afunction of distance from the Galactic center. For reasonable initialconditions, we find that clusters massive enough for rapid inspiral wouldinclude more massive stars (m >~ 30 Msun) than currently observed in theinspiral region. We point out several possible explanations for this apparentdiscrepancy.Comment: 28 pages in preprint style. 9 figures (1 color), 1 table. Minor modifications reflecting the version accepted by Ap