Astronomers call it "spaghettification": what happens when you venture too close to a black hole and fall in. Tidal forces stretch you and break you like a noodle, then your shreds circle the black hole until they collide and knock one another in.
On the upside, the energy released by your long fall and the crashing together of what used to be your atoms might produce a flash that can be seen across the universe.
In a case recently reported, it was merely an anonymous star in a faraway galaxy that met its doom. Thanks to luck and ever-increasing vigilance of the heavens, the whole world was watching.
"Indeed, it was quite a feast," said Matt Nicholl, an astrophysicist at the University of Birmingham in England.
He led a team of astronomers that described this stellar apocalypse in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"This black hole was a messy eater," added Kate Alexander of Northwestern University and a member of Nicholl's team.
In the end, she said, only about half the star was consumed by the black hole. The rest was blown outward into space at a breakneck speed.
Black holes are gravitational potholes in space-time predicted by general relativity, Albert Einstein's theory of gravity. They are so deep and dense that nothing, not even light, can escape them. Our Milky Way galaxy, and presumably most galaxies, are littered with black holes produced when massive stars died and collapsed in on themselves.
