We detected 155 double peaked 1612 MHz sources within 18
of
Sgr A*. Of the 155 detections, 52 are previously unknown OH/IR stars. In
addition, 3 single peak detections are given, which are most probably
masers of OH/IR stars as well. We have also listed 13 double peaked
sources that exceed the RMS noise levels by a factor of 8, and that most
probably originate in the molecular cloud complex located at the GC. The
sky and velocity distribution, as well as the expansion velocity
distribution of the low OH luminosity stars compare very well with the
previously known OH/IR stars in the GC. We therefore conclude that this
survey revealed the low OH luminosity part of the GC OH/IR star
population; the additional sources in the new sample are intrinsically
identical to the AGB stars of the known sample, except for a less
efficient OH maser. The OH/IR star OH maser luminosity distribution
peaks at 
photons per second. From this
survey however, we can not conclude with certainty that there is a low
luminosity cut-off of the OH maser luminosity distribution.
Acknowledgements
LOS hereby thanks all who made it possible to have this unusually large data set concatenated and analysed; in particular everyone at Sterrewacht Leiden for avoiding the local area network during nighttime, and the AIPS users in Onsala for flexible disk space usage. Thanks to Ian Glass for providing data before publication and to Michael Lindqvist for his continuous interest. For this project LOS received financial support from Sterrewacht Leiden, Svenska Institutet and Onsala Rymdobservatorium. HJvL acknowledges support for his research by the European Union under contract CHGECT920011 and AW acknowledges support by the Swedish Natural Science Research Council. In this article we use observations obtained with the Australia Telescope, which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO, and data collected with the Very Large Array, operated as part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory by Associated Universities Inc. under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France.