Fact Sheet
Snack Time
The supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy rips apart a passing star and begins to ingest its hot gas in this artist's concept. An orbiting X-ray observatory watch this process take place in a galaxy about four billion light-years away. The illustration is a time sequence showing the intact star at left, the squeezed and stretched body of the star at center, and the final gaseous remnants of the star funneling toward the black hole at right. [NASA/JPL/Caltech]
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