‘A hungry beast stalks the centre of the universe’

And rather than slurping up massive gulps of gas and stars like normal black holes, this one appears to be on a starvation diet, subsisting only on dainty snacks of stellar wind. ‘‘It’s really quiet, uncomfortably quiet,’’ said Mark Morris, a UCLA astronomer and co-leader of the team that announced the findings Monday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

The discoveries are a prodigious leap in the study of a cosmic body that four years ago existed only in theory. Now, having proven that a black hole does exist at the centre of the Milky Way, scientists are probing its most intimate details, watching it eat and burp and at times and suffer for lack of the daily behaviour. Astronomers say the Milky Way’s black hole, unlike any other yet found, sends out X-ray flares nearly every day.

The flares, Morris said, may be key to understanding the black hole’s ‘‘event horizon’’—the point of no return from which light and matter are doomed to disappear from the familiar universe.

‘‘People have theorised ad infinitum about the event horizon,’’ said Morris. ‘‘Here we have a good chance at seeing what’s really going on in this strange region.’’ Black holes are objects so massive and compact that not even light can escape their gravitational pull.

But the black hole in the Milky Way has been strangely dim, suggesting there may be little in the vicinity to munch on or that the black hole is a fussy eater, turning its nose up at what comes its way.

The black hole, dubbed Sagittarius A because it is in direction of the constellation Sagittarius, is about 27,000 light years from Earth. (LATWP)