KMOS view of the Galactic centre: I. Young stars are centrally concentrated

The Galactic centre hosts a crowded, dense nuclear star cluster with a half-light radius of 4 pc. Most of the stars in the Galactic centre are cool late-type stars, but there are also [> or =]100 hot early-type stars in the central parsec of the Milky Way. Our knowledge of the number and distribution of early-type stars in the Galactic centre is incomplete. Only a few spectroscopic observations have been made beyond a projected distance of 0.5 pc of the Galactic centre. The distribution and kinematics of early-type stars are essential to understand the formation and growth of the nuclear star cluster. We extracted more than 1000 spectra from individual stars and identified early-type stars based on their spectra. The central concentration of the early-type stars is a strong argument that they have formed in situ. A large part of the young O/B stars is not on the disk, which either means that the early-type stars did not all form on the same disk or that the disk is dissolving rapidly.