How black holes and shredded stars can illuminate galaxies

An artist's depiction of a supermassive black hole tearing apart a star, sending roughly half of the star's fragments into space, with the remainder forming a glowing accretion disk around the black hole. (Credit: DESY, Science Communication Lab)

In 2014, a strange cloudy object called G2 approached Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers were pretty excited, in part because they thought Sag A*’s intense gravity might tear it apart. That didn’t happen, and the event became a cosmic uproar. G2 survived the flyby by skipping … Read more