I have written, and reported about this orchestra director of our galaxy before. I added the TED lecture by Andrea Ghez from UCLA. Her group discovered S0-102 recently, adding one more piece of information to our understanding of this region of our galaxy. This star, as all the others near the hole, move almost at the speed of light. There is a big cloud going towards the hole, and being ripped to pieces as I write this.
"Recently, Gillessen et al. (2012) reported the discovery of a 3 MEarth cloud of gas and dust on its
way towards the supermassive black hole in the Galactic center. The identification of the source as a
dusty cloud is based on its Br-γ emission and its very red colors (see Figure 18). The source is rapidly
accelerating and is predicted to approach the black hole at a distance of only 3100 times the radius of
the event horizon in mid-2013. The gas cloud would likely be torn apart by the tidal forces of the black hole and then accreted. In this scenario, the accretion flow onto the Galactic black hole is expected to be temporarily disturbed by the added mass of this cloud, thereby giving rise to an enhanced accretion
luminosity. The encounter of the gas cloud with the black hole could be an ideal experiment to probe
the physics of accretion onto a supermassive black hole."
"In addition, many observations are now being proposed and planned to monitor Sgr A* in anticipation that the show could turn out to be quite interesting."
What is there in store for us?
When the cloud hits the fan, we'll get X-Rays, lots of them. Will they harm us? I have no clue. Maybe that is what the famous date in the Mayan Stele means.
Never a dull moment in this Universe of ours!
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