Video: Black Hole Devours Star, Is Awesome

I am a huge fan of space science-y stuff. (That sentence should indicate to you that my expertise is strictly limited to "fan.") I mean, I LOVE space. Before I loved baseball, ye verily, before I loved WRITING, I loved space. I remember clipping out pictures from magazines and newspapers and pasting them into this red spiral-bound notebook. 

So yeah, this gets my inner supergeek totally geeked up. According to YouTube—so grains of salt all around—"On March 28, 2011, NASA's Swift telescope detected intense X-ray flares thought to be caused by a black hole devouring a star."

Based off that, NASA artists recreated a model of what it looked like, which is the below video and which is awesome.

More YouTube-y details:

A sun-like star on an eccentric orbit plunges too close to its galaxy's central black hole. About half of the star's mass feeds an accretion disk around the black hole, which in turn powers a particle jet that beams radiation toward Earth.