Nasa | massive black hole shreds passing stars

This artist's rendering illustrates new findings about a star
shredded by a black hole. When a star wanders too close to a
black hole, intense tidal forces rip the star apart. In these
events, called “tidal disruptions,” some of the stellar debris is
flung outward at high speed while the rest falls toward the
black hole. This causes a distinct X-ray flare that can last for a
few years. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Swift
Gamma-ray Burst Explorer, and ESA/NASA's XMM-Newton
collected different pieces of this astronomical puzzle in a tidal
disruption event called ASASSN-14li, which was found in an
optical search by the All-Sky Automated Survey for
Supernovae (ASAS-SN) in November 2014. The event
occurred near a supermassive black hole estimated to weigh
a few million times the mass of the sun in the center of PGC
043234, a galaxy that lies about 290 million light-years away.
Astronomers hope to find more events like ASASSN-14li to
test theoretical models about how black holes affect their
environments.

During the tidal disruption event, filaments containing much of
the star's mass fall toward the black hole. Eventually these
gaseous filaments merge into a smooth, hot disk glowing
brightly in X-rays. As the disk forms, its central region heats up
tremendously, which drives a flow of material, called a wind,