If a star wanders too close to a black hole, it might be shredded. Some of that stellar material will be ejected into space (illustrated above). As the black hole sucks the material back up, it produces flares of the type recently observed around PS1-10jh, a supermassive gobbler sitting more than 2 billion light-years from Earth.
Credit: NASA, S. Gezari/Johns Hopkins University and A. Rest/Space Telescope Science Institute
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