A disk of hot gas swirls around a black hole in this illustration from Dec. 20, 2022. A long stream of hot gas on the right, coming from a star that was pulled apart by the black hole, feeds into the disk.
These events, known as tidal disruption events, can take just a matter or weeks or months from the destruction of the star to the formation of the disk. The gas gets hotter the closer it gets to the black hole, but the hottest material – a cloud of plasma called a corona – can be found above it.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech