During the holiday season you might have found yourself eating a lot. But imagine you are always hungry, and every time you eat your stomach just gets bigger! Well, the universe is full of bottomless pits, and scientists like to call them black holes. These bad boys have no discrepensy and will eat anything, even light. Our own galaxy has its resident Black Hole, christened Sagittarius A, which is 27,000 light years away and has a mass of four million times that of our sun. According to researchers using European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (yes, that is what they call it), the next item on Sag’s menu is a gas cloud.

Scientists predict that the gas cloud, which has a mass three times that of Earth, will meet it’s demise in 2013 when it reaches the event horizon, a point of no return in which nothing can escape the gaping jaws of the black hole. Stefan Gillissen, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany does not have much hope for the gas cloud. “It is not going to survive the experience,” he has direly stated.

It is predicted, however, that the gas cloud will be only partially consumed and the rest will be spit out into space. Large carnivores spray a shower of blood and guts when they devour their prey, but the consumption of a gas cloud by a black hole will create a shower of x-rays that scientists hope will help us learn more about the dangerously hungry Sagittarius A. — Robin Kilmer

For more information about the doomed gas cloud read BBC’s “Supermassive black hole will ‘eat’ gas cloud” or Nature’s “Astrophysics: The Final Plunge”