It’s no surprise that black holes are basically celestial Cookie Monsters, gobbling anything and everything in sight. But because that appetite includes light itself, it’s incredibly rare for us to actually see a black hole suck back an interstellar treat. Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope have found just that: a mysterious, giant gas cloud that’s rapidly been pulled into the maw of a supermassive black hole.The researchers, led by Reinhard Genzel of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, discovered the cloud as part of a now 20-year ESO program tasked with tracking stars as they whirl around the supermassive black hole, known as Sgr A*, at the center of our galaxy.In the seven years that the cloud’s descent has been tracked, its speed has nearly doubled to almost five million miles an hour. The cloud is being yanked around on an elongated oval orbit, as shown (along with the orbits of stars around the black hole) in the rendering above. In 2013 it will pass by the event horizon of the black hole at just under 25 billion miles away, a trifling distance.The dusty cloud, mostly made of hydrogen and helium, has a mass three times larger than Earth’s. As the cloud gets pulled in closer, it will be compressed by external pressure from the gravitational pull that’s a result of the black hole being four million times the mass of our Sun At the same time, that gravity will speed up the internal rotation of the gas while stretching its edge, essentially ripping it apart. The plasticity of the cloud makes it a wonderful study object for researchers looking at the extreme gravitational forces of black holes."The idea of an astronaut close to a black hole being stretched out to resemble spaghetti is familiar from science fiction," Stefan Gillessen, the lead author of the paper describing the cloud (PDF), said. "But we can now see this happening for real to the newly discovered cloud. It is not going to survive the experience."The edges of the cloud are already visibly tearing, and the whole shebang is expected to get shredded within the next few years. As that happens, it’s expected to heat up immensely (right now it’s a paltry 298 degrees centigrade) and, even cooler, it likely will start shooting off X-rays. It’s the only large mass of material currently near the black hole, so it will be the only big meal the black hole can expect for some time.
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