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Star Spaghettification Black Hole - This animation depicts a star experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a black hole during a ‘tidal disruption event’. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser Scientists hope to improve their understanding of the growth of supermassive black holes in massive galaxies by studying intermediate-mass black holes. After lurking undetected in a dwarf galaxy, an intermediate-mass black hole revealed itself to astronomers when it gobbled up an unlucky star that strayed too close. Known as a “tidal disruption event” or TDE, the violent shredding of the star produced a flare of radiation that briefly outshone the combined stellar...

Astronomers have published a major finding: A black hole has been "burping" out energy from a small star it was observed shredding in 2018, after two years in which it didn't eject any such material. How unusual is this? "Super unusual," Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian and lead author of the paper, tells NPR. "We've never really seen this before to this degree." Researchers made the discovery when they used a powerful radio telescope facility — the Very Large Array in New Mexico – to check in on some two dozen black holes...

Periodically, these gravitational behemoths will devoir stars and other objects in their vicinity, releasing tremendous amounts of light and radiation. In October 2018, astronomers witnessed one such event when observing a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light-years from Earth....another team from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics noticed something unprecedented when they examined the same black hole three years later. As they explained in a recent study, the black hole was shining very brightly because it was ejecting...leftover material from the star at half the speed of light. [T]he team observed the outburst while revisiting data...