New Scientist: Over the years, ice and hydrocarbons have been spotted in interstellar space by telescopes pointed at the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way's center. Their presence was revealed by the absorption spectrum in the IR. It was assumed that they were located far from the galactic center, however, because the level of radiation near the central black hole is high enough to melt most ice and potentially destroy hydrocarbons. Now, Jihane Moultaka of the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France, and her colleagues have revealed that some of that ice is quite close to the central black hole. To make that determination, they removed the signatures of ice and hydrocarbons from nearby regions of space. The leftover signals aligned with maps of galactic dust. Moultaka's team believes that the ice, which ranges in temperature from 10 K to 80 K, is sheltered by the dust particles. The presence of cold dust clouds suggests that stars can still form near the galactic center.
