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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 May 2014
We modeled numerically the infall of a small satellite galaxy on to the inner 200 parsec of our Galaxy, to test whether such an event perturbs gas orbiting in the central molecular zone (CMZ), as recently proposed by Lang et al. (2013). This process could have driven a large gas inflow around 10 Myr ago, explaining the past high accretion rate onto the supermassive black hole, and the presence of young stars in the inner parsecs of the Galaxy. Our simulations show a very small inflow of gas, not sufficient to produce the aforementioned effects.