News Astronomy

A star is torn

Black hole’s stellar feast caught by telescopes

By Nadia Drake

- More than 2 years ago

Note to stars: When circling a black hole, exercise caution. Stray too close and something unfortunate might happen. See accompanying illustration for details.

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.