How to SWALLOW A STAR.

As the doomed star approaches the supermassive black hole, it begins to experience tidal forces: Because gravity is stronger closer to an object, the black hole pulls more strongly on the star's near side than its far side. As matter is pulled off the star, it forms dramatic tidal tails and, eventually, an accretion disk (at bottom left). gl Torn apart The story of a TDE begins at the heart of a galaxy, near the edge of a supermassive black hole millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers now think that practically every large galaxy has one such black hole at its center. Hot, thin magnetic filaments are also visible, where strands of the black hole's powerful magnetic field have heated and energized gas. gl GLO:ast/01dec21:30n1.jpg PHOTO (COLOR): BELOW: Every circled object in this MeerKAT radio image is a supermassive black hole newly discovered by the telescope, firing relativistic jets into space. When astronomers look to the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy, we see over a dozen stars orbiting a common point where our galaxy's supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), resides. [Extracted from the article]
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