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martyb writes:

Researchers have recently observed what happens when a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) — the star is shredded with some of the material spiraling into the SMBH and some of it being cast out to space. By examining the X-rays that emanate from this encounter, they have found that the brightest ones come from the material that is closest to the SMBH's event horizon:

When a star comes too close to a black hole, the intense gravity of the black hole results in tidal forces that can rip the star apart. In these events, called tidal disruptions, some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speeds, while the rest falls toward the black hole. This causes a distinct X-ray flare that can last for years.

A team of astronomers, including several from the University of Maryland, has observed a tidal disruption event in a galaxy that lies about 290 million light years from Earth. The event is the closest tidal disruption discovered in about a decade, and is described in a paper published in the October 22, 2015 issue of the journal Nature.

[...] The optical light All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) originally discovered the tidal disruption, known as ASASSN-14li, in November 2014. The event occurred near a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy PGC 043234.

[...] Gas often falls toward a black hole by spiraling inward and forming a disk. But the process that creates these disk structures, known as accretion disks, has remained a mystery. By observing ASASSN-14li, the team of astronomers was able to witness the formation of an accretion disk as it happened, by looking at the X-ray light at different wavelengths and tracking how those emissions changed over time.

[...] The X-ray data also suggest the presence of a wind moving away from the black hole, carrying stellar gas outward. However, this wind does not quite move fast enough to escape the black hole's gravitational grasp. A possible explanation for the low speed of this wind is that gas from the disrupted star follows an elliptical orbit around the black hole, and travels slowest when it reaches the greatest distance from the black hole at the far ends of this elliptical orbit.

I am now trying to imagine the scenario in this story: Kepler K2 Mission Spots a Vaporizing Exoplanet Orbiting a White Dwarf as that white dwarf is in turn being shredded by a SMBH. Shredded turtles all the way down?

Abstract: Flows of X-ray gas reveal the disruption of a star by a massive black hole

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