NASA | Massive Black Hole Shreds 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 Xray flare that can last for a few years. NASA’s Chandra Xray Observatory, Swift Gammaray Burst Explorer, and ESA/NASA’s XMMNewton collected different pieces of this astronomical puzzle in a tidal disruption event called ASASSN14li, which was found in an optical search by the AllSky Automated Survey for Supernovae ASASSN 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 lightyears away. Astronomers hope to find more events like ASASSN14li 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 Xrays. As the disk forms, its central region heats up tremendously, which drives a flow of material, called a wind, away from the disk.

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