VLA Helps Astronomers Make New Discoveries About Star-Shredding Events Credit: Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF Black holes that are millions or billions of times more massive than the Sun lurk at the cores of large galaxies and can have profound effects on their surroundings. One of the more exciting of those effects comes when a star ventures too close to the black hole and falls victim to that monster’s powerful gravitational pull. The star is shredded by tidal forces in a process colorfully termed spaghettification. When that happens, some of the star’s material is pulled into a disk that orbits the black hole, heating rapidly and launching jets of fast-moving particles outward in two opposite directions. This produces an outburst that can be observed with a variety of telescopes, including radio, visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray instruments.