Massive balck hole sherds passing star

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 fl a re that ca n last for a few yea rs. NASA's Cha nd ra
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-141i, 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