"The idea of a black hole 'sucking in' a nearby star sounds like science fiction. Throwing quantum mechanics into the mix leads to a more exotic possibility: the astronaut might be burned alive in a wall of fire right as they crossed the event horizon without ever approaching the singularity-a concept that launched fresh debate over the infamous black hole information paradox. All the matter that fell in after the astronaut over millions of years would come crashing down on them in less than a second because of the extreme time dilation effects. ![]() In the 1990s, some physicists suggested that an astronaut who fell into a black hole would be crushed to death by a mass inflation "sheet singularity" rather than being stretched and compressed into spaghetti. Those jets are one way astronomers can indirectly infer the presence of a black hole. Now astronomers have recorded the final death throes of a star being shredded by a supermassive black hole in just such a " tidal disruption event" (TDE), described in a new paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This in turn can form a rotating ring of matter (aka an accretion disk) around the black hole that emits powerful X-rays and visible light. If that object is a star, the process of being shredded (or "spaghettified") by the powerful gravitational forces of a black hole occurs outside the event horizon, and part of the star's original mass is ejected violently outward. That means that part of an object's matter is actually ejected out in a powerful jet. ![]() In reality, only stuff that passes beyond the event horizon-including light-is swallowed up and can't escape, although black holes are also messy eaters. It's a popular misconception that black holes behave like cosmic vacuum cleaners, ravenously sucking up any matter in their surroundings. Animation depicting a star experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a supermassive black hole during a "tidal disruption event."
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