Black Hole in Milky Way galaxy

Britain-based astronomers say there is new evidence to suggest the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is consuming a steady daily diet of asteroids it has stripped away from their parent stars.

Milky Way's Black Hole

Our Milky Way galaxy’s supermassive black hole is apparently dining on all-you-can-eat asteroids, according to a new study.

Dubbed Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A star”), the monster black hole lies 26,000 light-years away in the galactic center. The black hole is surrounded by an accretion disk—a swirling ring of superheated gases—which spews radiation as matter is consumed.

But astronomers have also seen bright x-ray flares around the black hole since the start of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory mission in 1999. In addition, the flares have been seen in infrared wavelengths by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Occurring almost daily, the flares can last for up to an hour and can be up to a hundred times as bright as the black hole’s typical output.

Now, a team of astronomers led by Kastytis Zubovas of the University of Leicester in the U.K. thinks the flares can be attributed to the death throes of asteroids that are being drawn into the black hole’s accretion disk.

According to computer models based on Chandra data, there may be a cloud containing a few trillion asteroids orbiting Sagittarius A* at least a hundred million miles (160 million kilometers) from the edge of the accretion disk.

As the asteroids’ orbits get perturbed by the black hole’s gravity, the objects fall inward and get ripped apart by tidal forces. The rocky remains then encounter hot gases within the accretion disk and vaporize—much in the same way that a meteor disintegrates in Earth’s atmosphere.

When this occurs, Earthly observatories see flares of brilliant radiation.