Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a star's final moments as it was ripped apart by a black hole. Astronomers refer to this as a tidal disruption event. Essentially, a doomed star passes too close to a supermassive black hole, the star's outer gases are siphoned away by the black hole's gravitational field, and the star is torn apart until all that remains is a donut-shaped ring of gas that, in this case, is the size of our solar system. Hubble's powerful ultraviolet sensitivity was able to take in the intense radiation from the shredded star which allowed astronomers to study the disruption which occurred about 300 million light years from Earth.