SoylentNews

c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

Wired reports [wired.com] that for the first time ever telescopes all over the world may have a front-row look at a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy consuming the G2 gas cloud [space.com]. While one would think there's enough seats to fully enjoy the spectacle, the reality shows there are so many aspects to test, the available time [mpe.mpg.de] for the telescopes around the world may be more tightly packed than the space surrounding the black hole

Indeed, the scientists can't anticipate what happens:

1. if the black hole's accretion disk [wikipedia.org] is dense enough, the gas cloud may be heated up to temperatures greater than 10 million degrees, producing X-rays and other radiation that will be visible to our telescopes.
   The Event Horizon Telescope project [eventhorizontelescope.org] would be ready to image the area as the gas it falls into the the black hole, but don't hold your breaths yet: the earliest that this project will be up and running is 2016;
2. however, as recently as a few hundred years ago, the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole was producing much more radiation than today. If this is a sign of a low density accretion disk, it may happen the gas cloud slings around at a minimum distance of only 20 light-hours to the central black hole.
   Even if this would be the case, there could be around 10,000 solar mass black holes in the Milky Way's central region, so "there's a reasonable chance that one of those might be hit, and that would be absolutely fantastic" said astrophysicist Stefan Gillessen [mpe.mpg.de] of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany (the one that made the chance discovery [arxiv.org] of the G2 gas cloud back in 2003 [wikipedia.org])

So, soylent-gents, place your bets: will the G2 score the penalty kick or will it be a closed miss? What scenario are you cheering for?

(note to editors: please don't correct the "soylent-gents" appellation, it's intentional; I'd like to see if not more acceptable than soylentils. After all "soylent is people" not "soy and lentils")

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