We will present the results of our last NIR-MIR observations of the central parsec of our Galaxy.
These investigations benefit from the high quality of the ESO instrumentation and would have been impossible to conduct without the use of NIR adaptive optics.
NACO photometry results in the NIR combined with N- and Q-band photometry from images obtained with the MIR camera VISIR at the ESO VLT enabled us to construct Spectral Energy Distributions of over 60 compact sources. We identified four typical classes of sources, each of which show
characteristic features that may enable us to understand the nature of previously unclassified objects in the region. They cover sources in the northern arm, high and low luminosity bow-shock sources as well as the hot and cool stars.
On the other hand, spectroscopic observations with ISAAC at the VLT enabled us to build the first L-band data-cube of the central region corrected for the foreground extinction. This led to the discovery of 3 Wolf-Rayet stars all of which show, for the first time, prominent HeII emission lines in their MIR spectra providing an indication of their early evolutionary phase. One of the newly found stars seems not to belong to the two disk systems of young stars.
The data-cube also enabled us to study the distribution of water ice and hydrocarbon absorption features in the central parsec. The show of correlation that comes out between the distribution of these features suggests that the ISM presents itself as a (probably clumpy) mixture between the dense dusty and the diffuse ionized ISM.
Finally, very recent ISAAC M-band observations of a number of bright sources in the central parsec will be presented and the study of the CO gas/solid phase distributions will be discussed.