Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray space observatory, a team of British astronomers has concluded thatthe supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way could be continually devouring asteroids, which would explain the frequent eruptions observed (one per day) from the center of our galaxy.
Known asSagittarius A, this huge black hole produces flares that last a few hours with a brightness ranging from a couple of times to almost a hundred times greater than usual, and which have been observed by both Chandra and ESO’s VLT telescope in Chile.
Kastytis Zubovas of the University of Leicester (UK) and colleagues suggest thatthere is a cloud around Sagittarius A containing billions of asteroids and comets, stripped of their parent stars. Asteroids that pass in a radius of about 150 million kilometers around the black hole, roughly the distance between the Earth and the Sun, are smashed into pieces by the tidal forces of the black hole. These fragments vaporize from friction as they pass through the hot, thin gas flowing into Sagittarius A, similar to a meteor heating and glowing as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere. Eventually, a more intense eruption would occur and the debris of the asteroid would be swallowed up by the black hole.
Scientists have calculated that, in the estimated 10 billion years of useful life for the Milky Way, the black hole would have already engulfed a few trillion asteroids. And still, only a small fraction of the total would have been consumed, so the supply of the asteroids has hardly been exhausted, the astronomers conclude in the journal.Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society.
