The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy is about to have lunch. An enormous gaseous cloud, with almost three times the mass of planet Earth, is fast approaching the black hole's event horizon, and it will be ripped, shredded and gobbled down in 2013.
"It is not going to survive the experience," Stefan Gillessen, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, confirms in no uncertain terms.
This unique event will give astronomers a front row seat to something that's never been observed up close, before: how a black hole gulps down gas, dust and stars as it grows ever bigger. All other black holes are too far away to see first hand, while our closest one is just 27,000 light years from Earth.
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"When we look at the black holes in the centres of other galaxies, we see them get bright and then fade, but we never know what is actually happening," said Eliot Quataert, a theoretical astrophysicist at University of California.
"This is an unprecedented opportunity to obtain unique observations and insight into the processes that go on as gas falls into a black hole, heats up and emits light. It's a neat window onto a black hole that's actually capturing gas as it spirals in."
Gillessen, Quataert and physicist Reinhard Genzel have been tracking the cloud since 2008, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. They have seen the gaseous entity speed up to a velocity of 8 million kilometres an hour, and are now starting to see its edges fray as it tumbles deeper into the black hole's gravitational whirlpool.
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The cloud will soon come within about 40 billion kilometres of the event horizon. That's the limit beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape from a black hole. By 2013 the team should see violent outbursts of X-rays and radio waves as the cloud gets hotter and is torn to shreds. The light emitted around the black hole could increase by a hundredfold to a thousandfold, Quataert has calculated.
The Chandra X-ray satellite has already scheduled its largest single chunk of observation time in 2012 near the Milky Way's central black hole.
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This cloud is mostly helium and hydrogen, and it's particularly cold -- just 280 degrees celsius. It likely formed when plumes of gas from two nearby stars were shoved together by stellar winds, and it is now glowing under the ultraviolet radiation from surrounding hot stars. |
The cloud will soon come within about 40 billion kilometres of the event horizon. That's the limit beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape from a black hole. By 2013 the team should see violent outbursts of X-rays and radio waves as the cloud gets hotter and is torn to shreds. The light emitted around the black hole could increase by a hundredfold to a thousandfold, Quataert has calculated.
The Chandra X-ray satellite has already scheduled its largest single chunk of observation time in 2012 near the Milky Way's central black hole.
Environment Clean Generations
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