Astronomers observe a black hole 'devouring' a star

INA – SOURCES
 
scientists have announced NASA's Hubble Space Telescope caught what comes next in such a cosmic nightmare; also known as a tidal disruption event, during which a black hole feasts on its prey, or "accretes" a star. Astronomers shared the news Thursday at an American Astronomical Society meeting. 
 
"Typically, these events are hard to observe. You get maybe a few observations at the beginning of the disruption when it's really bright," Peter Maksym of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, said in a statement. "We saw this early enough that we could observe it at these very intense black hole accretion stages."
 
Caught in a chasm's deathly gravitational embrace, this star's spherical shape was seen aggressively mutated into a twisted strand of glowing matter. Before Hubble's glassy eyes, the star was viciously ripped apart until it looked like a warped whirlpool of fairy dust, encircling its predator and leaving behind a flaming tail to illuminate the otherwise blank void of space. 
 
Aptly, this is sometimes referred to as a black hole "spaghettifying" matter because even the strongest of objects with the misfortune of treading too close to the gravitationally extreme pit gets turned to flimsy, noodly shreds.
 
Experts said that this whole situation occurred some 300 million light-years away from Earth -- which also means it happened about 300 million years ago, yet light from the event just reached our planet so we're seeing it in what we call "the present."