Three gas clouds nearly grazed the edge of the Milky Way’s black hole
The observations confirm that the supermassive object really is a black hole
As far as close shaves with a black hole go, it doesn’t get much closer than this.
Scientists have spotted clouds of gas hurtling around the monster black hole at the center of the Milky Way, not far from the behemoth’s edge. Observed on three separate occasions, the gas clouds careened along at unimaginably fast speeds — 30 percent of the speed of light, researchers report October 31 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The gas seemed to be near a boundary known as the innermost stable circular orbit — the closest matter can circle the black hole without falling in. The clumps, which researchers observed when the gas caused flares of infrared light, orbited at a distance just a few times the radius of the black hole’s event horizon, the boundary from beyond which nothing, not even light, can return (SN: 5/31/14, p. 16). That’s equivalent to about a quarter of the distance from Earth to the sun.