Watching a Little Gas Cloud on its Way into the Galactic Supermassive Black Hole (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)

Presented by Prof. Andreas Burkert on 29th March 2019. The Galactic Center is one of the most fascinating and extreme places in the Milky Way. Harboring a supermassive black hole with a mass of order four million solar masses, it experiences cycles of activity and star formation, separated by periods of quiescence that last of order a million years. The Milky Way’s supermassive black hole currently is inactive. However a small, diffuse gas cloud (G2) has recently been detected on an orbit almost straight into the Galactic Supermassive Black Hole. Like comet Shoemaker Levy’s 1994 collision with Jupiter, the big challenge has started for astrophysicists to predict the outcome of G2’s close encounter with the supermassive black hole. Their models will be validated directly by observations within the next decade.