Cautiously Asher identified features. Such as a long, streaky wound, evidently the relic of a recent explosion. ‘Most of the accretion disc is star stuff. Every ten thousand years or so a star wanders in too close to the black hole. The tides get hold of it, and it is stretched out, turned into a tube of hydrogen – still fusing; the magnetic and gravitational fields close to the hole keep hold of it that tightly. But when it passes closest approach, those fields weaken, and the star explodes, with the savagery of a hundred supernovas. But even that is just a detail, this close to Chandra.’
-Xeelee: Redemption, Ch. 39