Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2021

33 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2021 ASTRO PUBLISHING what’s known as spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a black hole, are rare and not always easy to study. The team of researchers pointed ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and ESO’s New Technology Telescope (NTT) at a new flash of light that oc- curred last year close to a supermas- sive black hole, to investigate in detail what happens when a star is devoured by such a monster. Astronomers know what should happen in theory. “When an un- lucky star wanders too close to a su- permassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy, the extreme gravita- tional pull of the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of mate- rial,” explains study author Thomas Wevers, an ESO Fellow in Santiago, Chile, who was at the Institute of As- tronomy, University of Cambridge, UK, when he conducted the work. As some of the thin strands of stellar material fall into the black hole dur- ing this spaghettification process, a bright flare of energy is released, which astronomers can detect. Although powerful and bright, up to now astronomers have had trou- ble investigating this burst of light, which is often obscured by a curtain of dust and debris. Only now have