Measuring the effects of General Relativity at the Galactic Center with Future Extremely Large Telescopes

Understand

The Galactic center offers us a unique opportunity to test General Relativity (GR) with the orbits of stars around a supermassive black hole.

• Observations of these stars have been one of the great successes of adaptive optics on 8-10 m telescopes, driving the need for the highest angular resolution and astrometric precision.
• New tests of gravitational physics in the strong gravity regime with stellar orbits will be made possible through the leap in angular resolution and sensitivity from the next generation of extremely large ground-based telescopes.
• We present new simulations of specific science cases such as the detection of the GR precession of stars, the measurement of extended dark mass, and the distance to the Galactic center.