Freeform: G2 and Sagittarius A*

I was looking through my old texts (my entertainment method of choice when I'm bored at work) when I saw an old, unread message from my roommate.  The message contained a link to a New York Times article about a gas cloud that should enter the Schwarzschild radius of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Snack Time in the Cosmos

The article cited several scientists, including Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor, who were very excited about the opportunity to see the "spoon-feeding of a black hole."  Some scientists are predicting that the gas will be completely swallowed up by the black hole (they stuck really close to the eating analogy throughout the article) and others predict that some of the gas will escape from a "jet" out of the hole.  With all of the predictions going around, scientists guarantee that no matter what happens, they will learn something interesting.

The event, which is expected to take place any time in the next month, should happen in two roughly defined stages.  The first stage is pretty simple: the cloud, which has already spaghettified*, falls into Sagittarius A*.  When this happens, a shock wave will be created that has some pretty exciting effects.  It's most likely going to create X- and radio waves, which most scientists agree will probably be observable by ground-based telescopes.  If there's a star at the center of G2, the collision will produce light that we'll be able to see from the Earth.

Basically, this is a really exciting event for people who are interested in strong gravity phenomenon that will provide scientists with data for possibly decades to come.


*Spaghettification is the stretching effect that extreme gravity and tidal forces cause for objects near black holes.

Spaghettification GIF!!!

(It's surprisingly difficult to find good spaghettification GIFs, and even more difficult to embed them in blog posts.)