{"id":235236,"date":"2026-04-15T02:18:33","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T07:18:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/shredded-stars-reveal-how-black-holes-ignite-trillion-sun-flares"},"modified":"2026-04-15T02:18:33","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T07:18:33","slug":"shredded-stars-reveal-how-black-holes-ignite-trillion-sun-flares","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/shredded-stars-reveal-how-black-holes-ignite-trillion-sun-flares","title":{"rendered":"Shredded stars reveal how black holes ignite trillion-sun flares"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/shredded-stars-reveal-how-black-holes-ignite-trillion-sun-flares.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Supermassive black holes are among the most enigmatic objects in the universe. They typically weigh millions or even billions of times the mass of the sun and sit at the centers of most large galaxies. At the heart of the Milky Way lies Sagittarius A*, our galaxy\u2019s supermassive black hole, with a mass of about four million suns. But these black holes do not emit light, so astronomers can only detect them indirectly through their effects on nearby stars and gas.<\/p>\n<p>In a study <a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/2041-8213\/ae4748\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/i>, Eric Coughlin, assistant professor of physics in Syracuse University\u2019s College of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues clarify what happens when a star wanders too close to one of these black holes and is torn apart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Supermassive black holes are among the most enigmatic objects in the universe. They typically weigh millions or even billions of times the mass of the sun and sit at the centers of most large galaxies. At the heart of the Milky Way lies Sagittarius A*, our galaxy\u2019s supermassive black hole, with a mass of about [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}