Astronomers call it “spaghettification,” and it’s not a pretty idea: It’s what happens when you venture too close to a black hole and fall in.

In the end, she said, only about half the star was consumed by the black hole.

The flare had the hallmarks of a tidal disruption event, the technical name for when a black hole rips a star to shreds and eats it.

The result was a unique and multidimensional look — based on radio emissions, X-rays and gamma rays as well as old-fashioned visible light observations — at the complexities of death by black hole.

“But we still don’t understand exactly how these black holes grew to be as big as they are, or how they shape their host galaxies.” Studying stellar disruptions, she said, could help in understanding how these black holes eat, grow and interact with their environment.

The black hole in the Eridanus galaxy weighs in at about one million solar masses.

Nicholl and his team, a star about the size and mass of our own sun wandered into the center of the galaxy and came too close — about 100 million miles — to the black hole.

At that point, the gravitational pull from the black hole exceeded the gravitational pull from the star’s core, and the star was “spaghettified” into a long stream around the hole.

Astronomers have documented other such black hole disruptions recently, but such events rarely occur so close to our own galaxy, and their internal dynamics are often obscured by dust and gas kicked up by the fatal collision.

Spectral studies indicated that the material flowing outward from the black hole was identical to what was falling in — evidence that it was crumbs from the clumsily eaten star