Supermassive BLACK HOLE to stuff MYSTERY gas BLOB into open maw At the centre of our galaxy, a black hole could be about to chow down on one of the biggest meals it's ever had - a mysterious gas cloud around three times the mass of Earth. A montage of the galactic centre by the Swift X-ray Telescope from 2006-2013. Credit: Nathalie Degenaar A montage of the galactic centre by the Swift X …
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This is a cool article, but I agree that either I'm just not savvy enough to understand the intent of some of these statements, or the statements simply don't make sense:
"a mysterious gas cloud around three times the mass of Earth"; then, later in the article:
"But if G2 is hiding an old star, the display could be less dramatic, with the black hole only getting a few sips of the gas while the star passes by, dense enough to escape the event horizon."
Which is it? Is the cloud of gas ~3x the mass of Earth? Or does it contain a star, which by default makes it significantly larger than 3x Earth?
Or am I missing the point?
Its the gas cloud that as 3 times the mass of Earth. Gas, by its very nature, takes up a lot MORE room than a solid does. So think on the mass of Earth, multiply it by 3, add in an expansion ratio, and there you go.
That's a pretty fucking massive amount of gas, wouldnt you agree? Almost super in scale, dontcha think?
I was going to take issue with that as well, but you beat me to it.
If there's a star inside that miss the black hole, on what is the assumption that it'll "miss" the black hole based? That the star is in the exact center of the cloud? Can we assume that?
Have we ever observed a "local" black hole eating a star? That might be something to see. Is the center of our galaxy visible in the night sky in the northern hemisphere? It would be cool if something happened that made it visible to the naked eye. I'm sure those lucky aliens in other galaxies with active supermassive black holes have much more interesting stuff to watch. Well, until the gamma rays kill them, at least.
"Is the center of our galaxy visible in the night sky in the northern hemisphere?"
Nope, the rest of the galaxy is in the way! You can’t observe it in the visible spectrum at all due to the volume of stars and dust in the way. The only way to observe it is via the higher frequencies (in this instance, x-rays).
Even if it were visible, the event wouldn’t be visible – it’s a black hole, the light emitted from it are x-rays.
No, it wouldn't. Light speed means traveling at the speed of light, a light year is a measurement of distance based on how far light can travel in a standard earth year. Meaning anything "thrown in our direction at near lightspeed" would be here in some percentage more than 26,000 lightyears based on what fraction of the speed of light it was ejected at, but of course black holes don't typically eject matter at all as we understand them now...... I suppose something in just the right place going just the right speed and coming in at just the right angle could conceivably be drawn into a slingshot orbit by the gravity well by skimming just outside the point of no return, called the event horizon where no known particle can pass through without being trapped as gravity prevent even light from escaping when it enters that point, and come out accelerated to some ridiculous speed on a heading for our own solar system. A possibility so remote as to be functionally zero.
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