How A Black Hole Really Works

By GAUTAM NAIK
August 16, 2013

A cosmic monster in our own Milky Way is giving scientists a brilliant show


The black hole at the center of our galaxy has been on a near-starvation diet for almos a million years—but now it's time for a snack.

Scientists in Garching, Germany, are closely watching a rare event some 26,000 light years away: a supermassive black hole in the act of devouring a huge gas cloud. It's providing the first-ever glimpse of how a black hole uses its massive gravitational power to pull in and consume interstellar materials—a little understood phenomenon.

"The cloud is being torn apart," said Stefan Gillessen of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, who first brought the event to the world's attention in 2011.

A black hole can form when a large star dies and its matter collapses into a much smaller volume. It's as if the mass of the Earth were squeezed into a ball the size of a marble. The resulting gravity is so intense that even light cannot escape.

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