This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole in a tidal disruption flare. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
When a star passes within a certain distance of a black hole, the stellar material gets stretched and compressed – or “spaghettified” – as the black hole swallows it. A black hole destroying a star, an event astronomers call “stellar tidal disruption,” releases an enormous amount of energy, brightening the surroundings in an event called a flare. In recent years, a few dozen such flares have been discovered, but they are not well understood. Astronomers now have new insights into tidal disruption flares, thanks to data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)...
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