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December 15, 2011 04:05 am

Astronomers Find Gas Cloud About To Fall Into Black Hole


First time accepted submitter pigrabbitbear writes "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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/nOGGqq7lEVw/astronomers-find-gas-cloud-about-to-fall-into-black-hole

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