From- Sky &Telescope By - Monica Young Edited by - Amal Udawatta This artist’s illustration shows a disk of material (red, orange, and yellow) created after a supermassive black hole (depicted on the right) destroyed a star through intense tidal forces. After a few years, this disk expanded outward until it began intersecting another orbiting object — either a star or a small black hole — around the giant black hole. NASA / CXC / SAO and Soheb Mandhai / The Astro Phoenix In 2019 a supermassive black hole ate a star. It’s incredible that such an incredible event is now commonplace — not in individual galaxies, where such stellar meals happen only every 10,000 to 100,000 years, but in our telescopes, through which astronomers can monitor millions of galaxies to observe their feeding habits. The crumbs of a supermassive black hole’s stellar meal has revealed the presence of a second star in a close orbit. But in the course of studying this particular stellar feast, Mat