Accretion, not colliding spaghetti, flares-up as star is devoured by black hole - physicsworld.com

An extremely bright flare, originating from a star being devoured by a supermassive black hole, has been observed in a galaxy 215 million light-years away – making this the nearest tidal disruption event (TDE) ever seen.

If a star wanders too close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of its galaxy, it can experience tidal forces that exceed the gravitational forces holding the star together.

Through further calculations, Nicholl’s team concluded that the flash originated from a supermassive black hole as large as 1 million solar masses, as it devoured a star with a similar mass to the Sun.

By tracking changes in the blueshift of key absorption lines in the stellar debris, Nicholl’s team showed that the origin of the TDE’s early optical emission was dominated by an outflow of bright material, with speeds reaching roughly 10,000 km/s.

This suggested that the outflow was more likely to have been powered by black hole accretion, instead of collisions between spaghettified streams of debris.