Animation of a star torn apart by a black hole

In June 2010, astronomers saw the eruption of light from a star as it was shredded by a supermassive black hole. This happened 2.7 billion light years away in a distant galaxy! You can see HD versions of this at Hubblesite: Credit: NASA, S. Gezari (The Johns Hopkins University), and J. Guillochon (University of California, Santa Cruz)