00:03An object with a mass of about 50 Earths known only as X7 is slowly being stretched and pulled
00:11into the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Since it was first discovered
00:1620 years ago, scientists have wondered about its origins. After studying its extreme evolution
00:23compared to other nearby objects across that time period, researchers from the UCLA Galactic
00:29Center Group and Hawaii's Keck Observatory believe it could be a cloud of dust and gas left
00:35over from a collision between two stars. As the study's lead author Anna Kirlo contends,
00:42per a report from UCLA, one possibility is that X7's gas and dust were ejected at the moment
00:49when two stars merged. In the process, the merged star is hidden inside a shell of dust and gas.
00:55X7 could be the dust and gas ejected from a merged star that's still out there somewhere.
01:01She added,
01:02It started off comet shaped and people thought maybe it got that shape from stellar winds
01:07or jets of particles from the black hole. But as we followed it for 20 years, we saw it
01:13becoming more elongated. Something must have put this cloud on its particular path with
01:18its particular orientation. The object is currently on an orbital path around the black hole known
01:24as Sagittarius A that would take 170 years to complete. But based on its trajectory, the researchers
01:32predict the black hole's strong tidal forces will eventually tear it apart before then. In the meantime,
01:38it's clocking speeds of around 700 miles per second as it closes in on its final destination,
01:44Science Daily reports. The team's findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal.
01:54The team was published in the Astrophysical Journal. This team's 2018, on a report of the
01:54tested in the U.S. in the next year, black hole. The team was the president's
01:54department. The team was started in the U.S. in the first K-S bag. The team was
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