Cloud suicide will wake black hole sleeping giant
- 18:00 14 December 2011 by Stephen Battersby
The sleeping giant at the centre of
the Milky Way is about to wake up. A suicidal gas cloud is heading
towards the galaxy's supermassive black hole, which will probably
swallow the cloud, generating enormous flares of radiation that could
help explain why the black hole is normally so placid.
The doomed cloud was a surprise to
astronomers. "We have been looking at the galactic centre for 20 years,
but mainly to observe the motion of stars," says Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.
Genzel's colleague Stefan Gillessen spotted the cloud in images from the Very Large Telescope array
in Chile, taken in March this year. It is an unusually dense cloud, not
much bigger than our solar system and carrying about three times the
mass of Earth.
The suicidal gas cloud is due to break up in 2013 (Image: ESO/MPE/Marc Schartmann)
MORE: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21288-cloud-suicide-will-wake-black-hole-sleeping-giant.html
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