Hi, everybody. My name is Fraser Kane. I'm the publisher of University Day and this is your weekly space hangout for June 28, 2012.

This week we're going to be talking about a terrifying gas cloud that is headed toward the center of the galaxy.

More news on exoplanets, sniffing for life on Mars and what it's going to be like to land on Mars.

Joining me this week are our three of my favorite space journalists. We've got Emily Lottowala from the Planetary Society.

We've got Ian, Dr. Ian O'Neill from Discovered Space and Jason Major from like, man, University Day and light in the dark.

When I'm about to introduce Jason, I always forget because he's kind of everywhere. National geographic, starved space, hardest working man in space journalism.

For anyone who hasn't seen, I'm going to do just a tiny little bit of long rolling here, which is there was a really cool video that was a documentary that was produced by Google and released.

And now it's yesterday during the keynote address at the Google IO conference down in San Francisco.

And it highlights the virtual star party that we do on Google Plus. So it's like a three minute long documentary talking about all of the Tel Stops and astronomers and how we bring this all together and broadcast them on Google Plus.

And so if you haven't seen it, you can see it on my stream. We've got a poster of our universe today and it's pretty great. I'm really proud of it.

And I'm really proud as well of all of these foreigners that have been joining us. So definitely check it out. Yeah, it was really cool, really cool.

All right, well, let's get rolling first. Jason, I'm going to start with you and we're going to talk about a terrifying gas cloud that is on its way to the center of the galaxy.

And when this happens, what's going to happen?

When this happens, well, that's a trick. That's what we're trying to find out. You know, what's going to happen when this gas cloud actually reaches the monster in the middle of the Milky Way.

In the middle of the Milky Way, our galaxy and a lot of galaxies actually they're finding there's a super massive black hole.

I mean, there's black holes and then there's super massive black holes. This one here that's at the center of our galaxy is approximately the mass of four million suns.

So you take all of that mass and you smash it down into an area. I'm not quite sure what the radius of this thing is, but it may be around something that fit within the orbit of the planet Mercury.

So you have all of that mass smashed down in there and you're going to have a really, really massive object and basically an enormously powerful black hole.

So the problem with black holes, you can't really see them because they don't, the jury's out in this, but they don't admit radiation that is visible outside of what gets chucked out because when it comes down to it, they're kind of sloppy eaters.

So astronomers using the VLT telescope over at ESO's Paranel Observatory have spotted a giant cloud of charged gas particles heading towards this very same black hole.

And it's not, you say a cloud and you think of something that's up in the sky, but this is actually an enormously massive cloud.

It's somewhere along the lines of three times the mass of Earth. So it's a good sized cloud material. It's hotter than the surrounding gas that's already around that black hole.

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