Not so new news, but its evolving. I like the easy segue from past (26,000 years of it) to imminent present, at which point it will again be past: G2 started as a blob with approximately three times the mass of Earth. It has been falling in almost a perfectly straight line toward the central black hole at speeds exceeding 5 million mph. Because it is a diffuse and elongated object, there is no specific time when G2 is expected to be closest to the black hole (“We can’t say this will happen some Friday afternoon at 5 p.m.,” said Genzel.) You should of course keep in mind that the Milky Way’s center is 26,000 light-years from Earth so all this actually happened 26,000 years ago. Some models predict that G2 will slam into an atmosphere of gas and dust that hangs around in a disk around the central black hole, a remnant of previous feeding binges. If so, the cloud could heat up to temperatures greater than 10 million degrees, producing X-rays and other radiation that will be visible to our telescopes. Some of G2’s dust could even start spiraling into the black hole like water circling a drain, which would also heat it up and produce radiation.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 17:25:54 +0000
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