As a consequence of getting too close to massive black holes, astronomers observed the nearest example of a star that was shredded, or spaghettified, to date.

In 215 million light-years from Earth, a black hole that is one million times more massive than itself disrupted a sun-like star as it was tidally disrupted by a black hole 215 million light-years away.

Fortunately, this was the first time that astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, were able to study the optical light from it, and specifically its polarization, to gain insights into how the star died.

A lot of the star's material was blown away at high speeds up to 10,000 kilometers per second in their observations on Oct. 8, 2019, forming a sphere of gas that blocked most of the high-energy emissions produced as the black hole devoured the remaining star.

As a result of other observations made in the early days of the blast, called AT2019qiz, it was found that much of the star's matter was pushed outward into a powerful wind.

U.C. Berkeley professor of astronomy Alex Filippenko and a member of the research team have deduced the shape of a tidally springy star's gas cloud,' said Filippenko.

In many of the dozens of tidal disruption events observed to date, astronomers have not seen high-energy radiation, like X-rays. X-rays are obscured from view by gas blown outward by strong winds

U.C. Berkeley graduate student Kishore Patra, lead author of the study, said this observation rules out a class of theoretical solutions proposed previously. 

The polarization study strengthens the evidence of wind coming out of these events since you would not get a spherical geometry without enough wind. In this case,

After disruption, stellar debris is believed to form an eccentric, asymmetric disk, but eccentric disks are expected to exhibit very high levels of polarization, which would suggest that several percent of the total light would be polarized

Based on the polarized light, the researchers estimate it was emitted from a cloud 100 times farther from the star than Earth is from the sun. The spherical cloud had a radius of 100 astronomical units (au)

AT2019qiz is a tidal disruption in the constellation Eridanus observed with spectropolarimetry, a technique used to determine polarization across many wavelengths of light. 

All the polarized photons of the whole spectrum in October showed zero polarization, which indicates the cloud of gas is spherically symmetric - all the polarized photons were in balance with each other.