A tidal disruption event is an astronomical phenomenon that occurs when a star gets sufficiently close to a supermassive black hole's event horizon and is pulled apart by the black hole's tidal forces, experiencing spaghettification.
It was first proposed in 1975 that tidal disruption events should be an inevitable consequence of black holes in galaxy nuclei, whereas later theorists concluded that the resulting flare of radiation from the accretion of the stellar debris could be a unique signpost for the presence of a dormant black hole in the center of a normal galaxy.
In September 2016, a team from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui, China, announced that, using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, a stellar tidal disruption event was observed at a known black hole. Another team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., detected three additional events. In each case, astronomers hypothesized that the astrophysical jet created by the dying star would emit ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, which would be absorbed by dust surrounding the black hole and emitted as infrared radiation. Not only was this infrared emission detected, but they concluded that the delay between the jet's emission of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation and the dust's emission of infrared radiation may be used to estimate the size of the black hole devouring the star.