Lurking in the darkness of space, black holes are notorious for shredding stars that venture too close, and then gobbling them up. But astronomers have had only a rudimentary understanding of that dramatic process.
A new study sheds some light. Astronomers have spotted streams of star matter that came full circle around black holes and bumped into themselves. Such collisions were long theorized, but the new observations for the first time provide a direct look at the early stages of disk-forming around black holes.
