What actually happens when a star wanders too close to a black hole? It doesn’t just get swallowed whole. It gets pulled apart first, and astronomers call it a tidal disruption event.

The reason is that gravity gets stronger the closer you are. Near a black hole, the side of the star facing it gets pulled much harder than the far side, and that difference stretches the star until it can’t hold itself together. What’s left is a long stream of gas.

About half of that stream is moving fast enough to escape, and it flies off into space for good. The other half is still bound. It swings way out, slows, and comes falling back in. Close to a black hole, orbits don’t trace the same loop twice. They swing around a little each pass, so the returning gas ends up plowing into its own tail. Those collisions heat it up, and in the visualizer you can see the color shift from a dull red to white and then blue-white as it gets hotter.

Once the gas has crashed into itself enough, it settles into a hot, spinning disc and starts spiraling in. That’s when the flare happens. The disc gets so bright it outshines the whole galaxy around it for a while, and with some of these events, jets fire out from the poles.

The graph in the corner tracks how bright it gets. After the peak, the brightness drops off in a particular pattern that real tidal disruptions follow, shown as the dashed line. The black circle in the middle is the hole’s shadow, and if you watch the background stars as the view drifts, you can see them bend around it.