In 2011, astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have discovered a gas cloud with several times the mass of the Earth accelerating fast towards the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. This was the first time ever that the approach of such a doomed cloud to a supermassive black hole has been observed.
“The idea of an astronaut close to a black hole being stretched out to resemble spaghetti is familiar from science fiction. But we can now see this happening for real to the newly discovered cloud. It is not going to survive the experience,” explains Stefan Gillessen (MPE) the lead author of the paper.
During a 20-year program using ESO telescopes to monitor the movement of stars around the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy (eso0846), a team of astronomers led byReinhard Genzel at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany, discovered a unique new object fast approaching the black hole.
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