The Death of a Star

A black hole rips apart a star (bright blob upper left of center) in this artist's concept. Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory observed this event last year. The star passed close to a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy about 215 million light-years away in the southern constellation Eridanus. As the star approached, the black hole's gravity tore it apart, creating a brilliant flare that lasted for months. Magnetic fields around the black hole propelled some of the disrupted star's gas back out into space in the form of two long jets. In this view, the black hole is encircled by an accretion disk, which is a glowing disk of gas and dust pulled in from the space around it. [ESO/M. Kornmesser]