Echoes of black holes eating stars discovered

A black hole destroying a star, an event astronomers call ‘stellar tidal disruption,’ releases an enormous amount of energy, brightening the surroundings in an event called a flare. Two new studies characterize tidal disruption flares by studying how surrounding dust absorbs and re-emits their light, like echoes. This approach allowed scientists to measure the energy of flares from stellar tidal disruption events more precisely than ever before.