What event occurs when a star is torn apart by a black hole's tidal forces?

What event occurs when a star is torn apart by a black hole’s tidal forces? A tidal disruption event occurs when the black hole’s gravity overwhelms the star’s self-gravity.

As the star passes within the black hole’s tidal radius, the side facing the black hole is pulled more strongly than the far side. This stretches the star into a stream of debris, a process often nicknamed “spaghettification.” Some of the debris remains bound and eventually forms a hot accretion disk, producing a bright flare of radiation.

Tidal disruption events were predicted theoretically in the 1970s, with influential work by Jack Hills in 1975 and Martin Rees in 1988. The first candidates were detected in the 1990s, especially through X-ray observations. They usually involve dormant supermassive black holes in galactic centers, rather than the stellar-mass black holes found in systems such as Cygnus X-1.

A common mix-up is treating a TDE as a supernova. A supernova is a stellar explosion driven by stellar evolution or thermonuclear processes; a TDE is caused by an external gravitational encounter. In some cases, a star is only partly stripped and survives as a remnant.