Astronomers are closely watching a supermassive black hole that is set to gobble up an incoming cloud of gas and this could be their best ever glimpse of the mysterious black hole that lurks at the center of the Milky Way.
Scientists at the American Astronomical Society meeting said that a collision is likely to happen and fireworks may flare up once the giant gas cloud is gobbled up. Astronomers also want to share the "spectacle" with stargazers via a new public monitoring website. "This could be our black hole's biggest meal in hundreds of years," said Leo Meyer of the University of California in Los Angeles. "It might bring spectacular fireworks - and we want everybody to watch."
Whether or not there will be fireworks, however, remains a question as astronomers are not really sure if the blob is all gas. If it is, then it would glow bright. Otherwise, it would just fizzle out.
"I would be delighted if Sagittarius A* suddenly became 10,000 times brighter. However, it is possible that it will not react much-like a horse that won't drink when led to water," Jon Miller, an astronomer at the University of Michigan, said in a press statement. "If Sagittarius A* consumes some of G2, we can learn about black holes accreting at low levels-sneaking midnight snacks."
G2 refers to the blob of gas first spotted in 2011, while the black hole, whose mass is 4 million times than that of our sun, is called Sagittarius A*. To date, G2′s distance from Sagittarius A*is equal to about 200 times the distance that Earth is from the sun and it is expected to make the closest approach to the massive black hole in the next two or three months.
When this happens, astronomers would be able to see for the first time how a supermassive black hole gobbles up a "cosmic snack". Astrophysicists also hope that this would allow them to better understand how black holes grow and evolve as well as how matter reacts to extreme gravitational fields.
"Here we have an experiment where we get a chance to see how gas falls into a black hole," said Leo Meyer, an astronomer at the University of California in Los Angeles, who spoke at a briefing at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. "These are fundamental physical processes that are not well understood, and we have a unique opportunity here to learn more about them."
Here's a computer generated simulation of what it would be like when the black hole swallows up the gas cloud -
