Tidal Radii at the Galactic Centre: Which Stars Survive Their Closest Approaches

A star that wanders too close to Sagittarius A* is pulled apart by the tide, and the boundary of survival is computable star by star. This paper evaluates tidal radii across the stellar mass range of the nuclear cluster. A solar-type star is disrupted inside 0.76 AU, 18 gravitational radii; a fifteen-solar-mass star of the kind that populates the S-star cluster has a tidal radius of 1.7 AU. Against these boundaries, the pericentre of S2 at 119 AU is a comfortable 157 tidal radii out, while the reported pericentre of the eccentric star S62 near 18 AU sits only 10.7 tidal radii from disruption for a massive star, and inside the comfort zone of none. The tidal radius equals the Schwarzschild radius, the point beyond which a hole swallows solar-type stars whole without a flare, at a black-hole mass of 1.1e+08 solar masses, two dozen times the actual mass, so disruptions at the Galactic centre remain visible events. Computed from published masses and standard stellar radii.