Missing bright red giants in the Galactic center: A fingerprint of its
  once active state?
  In the Galactic center nuclear star cluster, bright late-type stars exhibit a
flat or even a decreasing surface-density profile, while fainter late-type
stars maintain a cusp-like profile. Historically, the lack of red giants in the
Galactic center was discovered via the drop in the strength of the CO
absorption bandhead by Kris Sellgren et al. (1990), later followed by the
stellar number counts based on the high angular resolution near-infrared
observations. Several mechanisms were put forward that could have led to the
preferential depletion of bright red giants: star-star collisions, tidal
stripping, star-accretion disc collisions, or an infall of a massive cluster or
a secondary black hole. Here we propose a novel scenario for the bright
red-giant depletion based on the collisions between red giants and the nuclear
jet, which was likely active in the Galactic center a few million years ago and
could have led to the formation of the large-scale $\gamma$-ray Fermi bubbles.
The process of the jet-induced ablation of red giants appears to be most
efficient within $\sim 0.04\,{\rm pc}$ (S-cluster), while at larger distances
it was complemented by star-accretion disc collisions and at smaller scales,
tidal stripping operated. These three mechanisms likely operated simultaneously
and created an apparent core of late-type stars within $\sim 0.5\,{\rm pc}$.
