In a galaxy far, far away, a star is sent hurtling towards the galactic center by the astronomical analogue of a roller derby whip. As it careens towards the behemoth black hole below, it begins to spin faster and faster as the pull across its body intensifies... until it is wrenched apart, shredded into a rapidly spinning frisbee of gas. About half of what was once the star has enough energy to escape the black hole, while the other half is doomed to an eternity of falling towards a place in the universe where the laws of physics as we know them break down.

The data pours in daily, flooding hard drives of laptops and servers around the globe. Astronomers manning these devices are all combing the deluge for a common character: the signature of a star, being shredded by the monstrous black hole at the center of a galaxy.

Touched off by the addition of a detailed theoretical description of what this might look like to a fire hose of data on transient phenomena in the skies above, astronomers at Berkeley are arguably leading the charge. That theoretical spark? The work of graduate student Linda Strubbe and (our common) advisor Eliot Quataert in the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department. Their work, published in year, was the first to investigate the physical processes that ensue when a star goes plunging down towards a black hole. The basics are relatively easy to understand. Much like the disintegration of Comet Shoemaker-Levy as it approached too close to Jupiter in year, a kamikaze star that gets too near a black hole will experience a pull across its surface that overcomes the gravity holding it together. This happens because the gravity of the black hole gets weaker going out from the black hole, so the side of the star nearest the hole is pulled in much more strongly than its opposite, a process Astronomy Professor Alex Filippenko thoroughly enjoys calling "spaghettification." You likely know this concept of differential pulling by its sometimes nautical name: tides.