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We report the discovery of molecular gas streams orbiting around an invisible massive object in the central region of our Galaxy, based on the high-resolution molecular line observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. The morphology and kinematics of these streams can be reproduced well through two Keplerian orbits around a single point mass of (3.2 ± 0.6) × 10 4 M ⊙ . We also found ionized gas toward the inner part of the orbiting gas, indicating dissociative shock and/or photoionization. Our results provide new circumstantial evidences for a wandering intermediate-mass black hole in the Galactic center, suggesting also that high-velocity compact clouds can be probes of quiescent black holes that abound in our Galaxy.
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Takekawa et al. (2019) studied this question.
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