NASA | Massive Black Hole Shreds Passing Star

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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-14 li, 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.