Star versus black hole
You’d think a star wouldn’t stand a chance against a supermassive black hole. But astronomers have spotted a star that apparently did battle with one of these behemoths, and later came back for another fight.
In 2022, astronomers spotted a bright flare at the center of a galaxy some 408 million light-years away. Labeled AT 2022dbl, it was what’s known as a tidal disruption event, where a star passes too close to a supermassive black hole, which rips it to shreds. These incredibly energetic events are nothing new to astronomers. But a surprise came two years later, when researchers spotted a nearly identical flare in exactly the same location.
Having confirmed it wasn’t just a similar star suffering the same fate, the astronomers said on July 23, 2025, that this was the first confirmed case of a star surviving a tidal disruption event and returning to experience another.
The researchers published their peer-reviewed findings on July 1, 2025, in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Black holes and star spaghettification
Astronomers believe that supermassive black holes – black holes with masses between hundreds of thousands and billions of times greater than our sun – exist at the centers of almost all large galaxies. That includes our own Milky Way galaxy, which contains the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.
One of the ways distant supermassive black holes reveal themselves to us is during tidal disruption events. That happens when they feast on stars. Roughly every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a given galaxy, a star wanders too close to the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. The immense strength of the black hole’s gravity exerts huge tidal forces on the star. In essence, the black hole pulls much more strongly on one side of the star than the other. This massively stretches the star, in a process astronomers call spaghettification.
Having lost its cohesion, some of the shreds of the star are thrown into space, while the rest forms an accretion disk around the black hole. The black hole slowly consumes this stellar material over weeks or even months. Meanwhile, the material swirls around the black hole at a pace approaching the speed of light. As it does so, it glows incredibly brightly, illuminating the black hole and giving astronomers a chance to study its properties.
A black hole snack or a whole meal?
Over the past decade, astronomers have spotted several tidal disruption events that haven’t behaved as they expected. The temperature and brightness of these flares have been much lower than theories predict. And AT 2022dbl – this newly discovered double tidal disruption event – could provide the answer.
Having ruled out a coincidence or a gravitational trick of the light, the scientists said the occurrence of two nearly identical flares suggests they both came from the same star. Thus, it wasn’t completely destroyed in the first event. Much of the star must have remained largely intact and returned 700 days later in its orbit to undergo the same experience again.
So this supermassive black hole might be nibbling on its food, rather than gobbling it down all at once as scientists previously believed.
Will this star fight again?
So now the big question: Did the star survive its second dance with death? We shouldn’t have to wait too long for an answer, study co-author Iair Arcavi explained:
The question now is whether we’ll see a 3rd flare after two more years, in early 2026. If we see a 3rd flare, it means that the 2nd one was also the partial disruption of the star. So maybe all such flares, which we have been trying to understand for a decade now as full stellar disruptions, are not what we thought.
Perhaps even more interesting is the prospect that we don’t see a 3rd flare. That would mean the 2nd flare marked the total destruction of the star. And that would imply that partial and full disruptions look almost identical. This is something scientists previously predicted, but no one has found evidence for yet.
So whether this brave star survived its latest encounter or not, 2026 will bring an improved understanding of tidal disruption events. Arcavi summarized:
Either way, we’ll have to re-write our interpretation of these flares and what they can teach us about the monsters lying in the centers of galaxies.
Bottom line: Astronomers have made the first confirmed detection of a star surviving destruction at the hands of a supermassive black hole. Then it returned for round two.
Source: The Double Tidal Disruption Event AT 2022dbl Implies that at Least Some “Standard” Optical Tidal Disruption Events Are Partial Disruptions
Via Tel Aviv University
Read more: Astronomers see a star ‘spaghettified’ by a black hole