Posted Friday, Aug. 26, 2011, at 6:30 AM In late March of 2011,
an extraordinary event occurred: a black hole in a distant
galaxy tore apart and ate a whole star (I wrote about this twice
at the time; here's the original post, and a followup article
including a Hubble image of the event). Now, there's more info:
the black hole, lying at the center of a galaxy nearly 4 billion
light years away, has about 8 million times the mass of the Sun.
When it tore the star apart, about half the mass of the star
swirled around the black hole, forming twin beams of matter and
energy that blasted outward at a large fraction of the speed of
light. The folks at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center made a
great animation to show this: The star was ripped apart by
tides. The thing about black holes is, they're small: this one
was probably about 15 million kilometers across. A typical star
is about a million km across (the Sun is 1.4 million kilometers
in diameter, for comparison). This means the star could get
really close to the