We recently had a couple of papers — this one led by Sarah Norman, a masters student at Leicester University in the UK, and this one — that explore the regime of “deep tidal disruption events,” where a star comes extremely close to a supermassive black hole (well within the distance where it is destroyed by tides). For these close encounters, the star is highly compressed by the vertical component of the tidal force of the black hole, which is an extreme version of the same force that produces the low tides on the Earth. You can also check out the movie on the Movies page. Comments welcome!
Assistant Professor and Astrophysicist