PERICENTER PASSAGE OF THE GAS CLOUD G2 IN THE GALACTIC CENTER

We have further followed the evolution of the orbital and physical properties of G2, the object currently falling toward the massive black hole in the Galactic Center on a near-radial orbit. New, very sensitive data were taken in 2013 April with NACO and SINFONI at the ESO VLT. The "head" of G2 continues to be stretched ever further along the orbit in position-velocity space. A fraction of its emission appears to be already emerging on the blueshifted side of the orbit, past pericenter approach. Ionized gas in the head is now stretched over more than 15,000 Schwarzschild radii R-S around the pericenter of the orbit, at approximate to 2000 R-S approximate to 20 light hours from the black hole. The pericenter passage of G2 will be a process stretching over a period of at least one year. The Brackett-gamma luminosity of the head has been constant over the past nine years, to within +/- 25%, as have the line ratios Brackett-gamma/Paschen-alpha and Brackett-gamma/Helium-I. We do not see any significant evidence for deviations of G2' s dynamical evolution due to hydrodynamical interactions with the hot gas around the black hole from a ballistic orbit of an initially compact cloud with moderate velocity dispersion. The constant luminosity and the increasingly stretched appearance of the head of G2 in the position-velocity plane, without a central peak, is not consistent with several proposed models with continuous gas release from an initially bound zone around a faint star on the same orbit as G2.