A black hole tore a star apart and played with the debris

On April 9, 2019, the light from a cosmic catastrophe reached Earth: A star ripped apart by a black hole. Everything about this event is terrifying and amazing, including the colossal energy emitted, the stream of debris from the star circling the black hole, and how the spin of the black hole may be flinging that debris off like batter from a kitchen mixer blade.

The event caught the attention of two different sky survey observatories (ZTF and ATLAS) just days apart, and was at first thought t...