This star is being devoured… very slowly

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, in 2017 astronomers documented a case where a black hole kept feeding on a star’s remains for nearly a decade. In the universe, some stars don’t die in an explosion… they’re slowly torn apart by gravity.

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