英語聽力：黑洞吞噬—20

The super bright quasar phase having ended many billions of years ago, when the fuel that fires violent emissions was completely consumed. But now, with the approaching gas cloud and aprospect of feeding, the black hole should get brighter.

Exactly how much is pretty hard to tell. We know roughly the amount of mass. If you dump that amount of mass very quickly onto the black hole, it will be a huge event. I mean it will, the galactic centre of black hole would flare up by all its magnitude.

A feeding being drawn this scale is considered a lower probability. What astronomers consider to be more probable is that the black hole will take snack size nibbles out of the gas cloud.

It probably will take quite a while, let's say 10 years and so this whole event will then stretch out and therefore at any given time a little less spectacular. But we will see. I think we probably will see these effects.

And so this summer, the world's most powerful telescopes will be keenly trained on our galactic centre as the predictions of astronomers are put to the test in the fiery ordeal of actual events.

With the new understanding of the behavior of feeding black holes at the heart of galaxies, an unexpected new story is now emerging, a story that reaches right out to our own solar system and surprisingly touches us here on planet earth.