Did you know there’s a star being devoured by a black hole… but not all at once? The phenomenon is called a tidal disruption event. It happens when a star gets too close to a black hole, and the difference in gravity between one side of the star and the other stretches it until it’s torn apart, in a process astronomers call “spaghettification.” But the star doesn’t vanish immediately: part of its material ends up orbiting the black hole and forms an extremely hot disk that emits enormous amounts of radiation, mostly in X-rays. The most impressive part is that this process can last months or even years. In fact,…