Black Hole at Galaxy's Heart Launches Planet-Size 'Spitballs'
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/.../01/black-hole-spitballs-planets-galaxies-stars-space-science/
The massive object at the Milky Way’s core is shredding stars and tossing out their remnants, new simulations suggest.
The monster black hole at the center of our galaxy is shooting out “spitballs” the size of planets—and one may be sprinting
through space several hundred light-years away from Earth.
It seems a somewhat odd phenomenon, given the prevailing idea that black holes tend to slurp things up rather than fling stuff out.
But new simulations from Harvard University undergraduate Eden Girma, presented January 4 at the American Astronomical Society’s
annual meeting in Texas, suggest that our galaxy’s massive black hole could be responsible for sending an astronomical amount of
these free-floating objects zipping through space.
“Our galaxy could be populated by hundreds of millions of these cold fragments that are the direct remnants of stars,” Girma says.
Those rogue, planet-like bodies form in a most unusual way.
Every 10,000 years or so, a star tiptoes too close to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole parked in the center of the Milky Way.
When that happens, the star’s life as a round, incandescent nuclear furnace is over. The black hole’s intense gravity disrupts and
spaghettifies the star, leaving streamers of gas strewn near the Milky Way’s heart.
