Ok, so here is a "dumb" version of this. The jets that blackholes spit out are basically a galactic scale welding torch / particle accelerator and if you get caught in the beam bad things will happen to you. Archive: https://archive.today/Sycwt From the post: >>Is there anything more awesome in space than black holes, the phantasmal, jet-spewing regions of spacetime that are so densely packed with matter that they collapse under their own gravity? Actually, yes: Some of these black hole jets seem to cause stars to explode. These stars are not in the direct paths of the jets, but close enough to the near-light-speed particle beams that it causes them to erupt. The stars in question are white dwarfs—burnt-out shells of stars that take on hydrogen from their companion star. Once the dwarfs have about a mile-thick layer of hydrogen on their surfaces, the layer explodes off the star and the cycle repeats.