Location of the bow shock ahead of cloud G2 at the Galactic Centre

We perform detailed magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the gas cloud G2 interacting with the accretion flow around the Galactic Centre black hole Sgr A^*. We take as our initial conditions a steady-state, converged solution of the accretion flow obtained earlier using the general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic code HARM. Using the observed parameters for the cloud's orbit, we compute the interaction of the cloud with the ambient gas and identify the shock structure that forms ahead of the cloud. We show that for many configurations, the cloud front crosses the orbit pericentre seven to nine months earlier than the centre-of-mass.