Like eager paparazzi, astronomers trained an arsenal of telescopes this spring on the Milky Way’s crowded center, hoping for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to watch an immense gas cloud collide with the galaxy’s supermassive black hole. The shock generated when the cloud smashed into gas surrounding the black hole, 26,000 light-years from Earth, could have produced radio waves, X-rays and a possible brightening of infrared light. But researchers saw nothing.

New observations of the cloud, known as G2 — along with a neighboring gas cloud, G1, that passed close to the black hole 13 years ago — have led astronomers to an intriguing explanation for the light show that wasn’t.

Stefan Gillessen of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and his colleagues found that G1 and G2 have identical orbits that lie in the same plane as that of young stars near the Milky Way’s center. The team suggests that both clouds, along with a gas tail that appears to be trailing G2, are all part of a stream of gas that gravity ripped from the envelope of a young star about 100 years earlier.

Like rocks carried by a swift current, the clouds may be dense lumps embedded in the moving gas stream. There may be additional lumps in the tail that could serve as future snacks for the black hole, known as Sagittarius A*.