Astronomers have witnessed an extremely rare occurrence: the end of a star's life, as it's obliterated by a supermassive black hole. And this particular star's collapse was even more unique, because ...

A supermassive black hole tears up a star in a tidal disruption event, pulling gas away and creating an accretion disk. Credit: Ralf Crawford illustration When a star strays too close to a ...

Telescopes have captured the rare light flash from a dying star as it was ripped apart by a supermassive black hole. This rarely seen "tidal disruption event" — which creates spaghettification in ...

Astronomers have detected an impressive supermassive black hole devouring a star – and they've nicknamed it "Scary Barbie," in part because of its terrifying power. Scientists called it one of the ...

Tidal disruption involves death by spaghettification of a nearby star to a black hole Spaghettification occurs when a star is devoured by a black hole Astronomers can now better understand how ...

In work that could help scientists understand how matter behaves when it's close to supermassive black holes, a star has been observed while getting sucked into one in what's known as a tidal ...

Astronomers have spotted a rare and radiant pulse of light—the last gasp of a dying star that has been sucked toward the center of a supermassive black hole and shredded into sinuous strings of ...

Picture yourself drifting in space, caught in the pull of a black hole. The idea feels like pure science fiction, yet physicists have spent decades calculating what would really happen if a human fell ...

It’s a popular misconception that black holes behave like cosmic vacuum cleaners, ravenously sucking up any matter in their surroundings. In reality, only stuff that passes beyond the event ...

When a star strays too close to a supermassive black hole, extreme gravitational forces ravage it, shredding and stretching it into spaghetti. The term for this gruesome process is actually ...