Black Hole Devours a Star Decades Ago, Goes Unnoticed Until Now

Every galaxy, including our own Milky Way, has at its center a massive black hole whose gravity influences the stars around it. Generally, the stars orbit around the black hole without incident, but sometimes a star will wander a little too close, and the black hole will "make a meal" of the star in a process astrophysicists have termed spaghettification. "Gravity around the black hole will shred these unlucky stars, causing them to be squeezed into thin streams and fall into the black hole," says Vikram Ravi , assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech. "This is a really messy process. The stars don't go quietly!" As the stars are devoured, their remains swirl around the black hole and glow with light of different frequencies, which telescopes can detect. In some cases, the stellar remains are expelled in powerful jets that shine with radio-frequency light waves. Ravi and his team, including two graduate students at Caltech, have now discovered what appears to be one of these black-hole-eating-a-star events-also known as tidal disruption events, or TDEs-using archival observations made by radio telescopes.