The Galactic Center Black Hole In Its Natural Habitat

Abstract: The Milky Way’s Galactic Center black hole is the closest supermassive black hole. It is the only black hole whose natural habitat – the inner ~parsec environment – can be resolved up to individual stars, small streams, and faint clouds. Therefore, it is an ideal candidate to test our understanding of black hole feeding, accretion, feedback, and (in the future) even gravity itself. But despite its proximity and accumulated knowledge its behavior has proven to be one of the hardest to describe. In this talk we will take a broad look at the Galactic Center and argue that the lack of communication between the adjacent astrophysics subfields leads to certain important effects being overlooked. We will show that taking better care of big picture behavior leads to improved description of the observed effects.