A star in a faraway galaxy is sending itself into a spiral of doom, repeatedly plunging through a disk of hot gas surrounding a black hole and releasing powerful bursts of X-rays in the process. Soon, it will be torn apart.
That's the assessment of what's going on in the core of a galaxy about 300 million light-years away called LEDA 3091738, where a giant black hole nicknamed "Ansky" is being orbited by a much lower-mass companion object.
