SPACE.com — Black Hole Grabs Planet-Sized Snack
SEATTLE— An ancient X-ray outburst from the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy caused surrounding gas clouds to glow brightly in a cosmic light show that is only now being detected.
The output likely involved the consumption of a snack equal in mass to the planet Mercury, researchers said here yesterday at the 209th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Called Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s core is located some 27,000 light-years away and has an estimated mass of about three million suns. It is surrounded by several massive iron-rich gas clouds that glow and emit their own X-rays when struck by photons or electrons [image].
No X-ray telescopes were in place when light from the black hole outburst first began to reach Earth about 60 years ago, but astronomers deduced the event based on “light echoes” from the clouds recently recorded by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. [Read on]