Two years ago , astronomers realized that a gasoline cloud was on a collision track with the supermassive black pickle at the center of our wandflower . The confrontation has since aim topographic point — and it was all recorded in real time . Here ’s how it all went down — and a arresting simulation to go along with it .
The stargazer , who used the ESO ’s Very tumid Telescope ( VLT ) to chronicle the event , are n’t entirely certain where the gas cloud occur from . It could have been created by star winds from the stars orbiting the black hole , or the result of a reverse lightning from the astronomical center .
Regardless , its coming upon with the Milky Way ’s central supermassive sinister trap was a penny-pinching shave indeed . The cloud ’s tight approach was a length equal to five time the aloofness of the satellite Neptune to the Sun ( about 25 billion kilometers ) . That ’s dumfounding given that we ’re talking about an object with a aggregate four million times that of the Sun ; any closer and the entire thing might have fallen completely in .
As a result , the gas at the head of the cloud has been unfold to over 160 billion kilometers around the closest detail of the orbit to the black hole . What used to front like a circular blob now looks like a long , thin strand of spaghetti . And in fact , the uttermost extension of the cloud means that it ’s no longer a singular event , but rather a process that ’ll take over a year to unfold .
Another effect of the encounter is that the head of the cloud is now coming back at us at more than 10 million km / hour along the orbit . That ’s about 1 % of the pep pill of twinkle ! It also mean that the head has made its closest approach to the contraband hole . The stern itself is a bit slower , chugging along at about 700 klick / s.
The event was recorded this retiring April with the VLT in Chile . The squad , which was led by Stefan Gillessen of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany , used a 20 - hour photo with a special infrared spectrometer , called SINFONI , to measure the faint spark .
persona : VLT observationsf from 2006 , 2010 , and 2013 , colored in blueish , green , and red respectively . Credit : ESO / S. Gillessen .
The research was presented in a paper “ Pericenter passage of the gun cloud G2 in the Galactic Center . ” It ’s set to come out in an upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal .
AstronomyAstrophysicsBlack holesPhysicsScienceSpace
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