Some stars encounter supermassive black holes and live to tell the tale. New research shows why the flares these encounters cause dim over repeated episodes, and it may be down to the way these stars spin and an escaping binary partner that leaves them to be a stellar snack for a black hole.
Some stars are unfortunate enough to encounter the supermassive black holes that sit at the heart of every galaxy, being subjected to immense tidal forces that turn them into a strand of stellar spaghetti, a process called "spaghettification." This plasma pasta wraps around the black hole and is gradually fed to it, with some former star stuff being ejected as near-light-speed jets. These occurrences are called tidal disruption events (TDEs).
