THE black hole at the centre of our galaxy is playing with its food.
In March, astronomers were looking forward to the spectacle of the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's centre gobbling up a giant gas cloud, dubbed G2. In the end, it escaped unscathed.
Andrea Ghez at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been following the cloud ever since with her team, has discovered that it contains a secret. A very large star at the gas cloud's centre is holding it together so the black hole wasn't able to pull it in. But Ghez says this star was originally a pair of smaller ones that the black hole's gravity merged into one.
G2 is now escaping from the black hole's greedy clutches, and won't return to the closest point in its orbit for another 300 years (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, doi.org/10/wvs).
This article appeared in print under the headline "Eat me, not"
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