Images of gas cloud being ripped apart by the black hole at the centre of the galaxy

These observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope, using the SINFONI instrument, show how a gas cloud is being stretched and ripped apart as it passes close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy. The horizontal axis shows the extent of the cloud along its orbit and the vertical axis shows the velocities of different parts of the cloud during the last ten years. The cloud is now (2013) dramatically stretched out and the velocity of the front is several million km/h different from that of the tail.