Simulations of doomed gas cloud suggest star at its heart

Nature : An elongated gas cloud that is being pulled toward the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way may arise from a planet-forming disk around a young star. Based on their simulations, Ruth Murray-Clay and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, believe that the star could have been pulled from orbit around the black hole. They propose that the gas cloud itself results from planetary dust being boiled away by UV radiation from the vicinity of the black hole and that the cloud’s distorted shape results from the black hole’s intense gravitational field. Murray-Clay and Loeb’s simulation matches many of the observed characteristics of the gas cloud, but calculates only a 0.1% chance that a star pulled from its galactic orbit toward the black hole could have followed the gas cloud’s observed path. However, if the model is correct, as the cloud nears the black hole, the increase in radiation intensity would illuminate the denser material around the star.