Astronomers have gotten one of their best looks yet at a black hole devouring a star and spitting out its remains at a quarter of the speed of light.

In 2005, a team noticed a bright flare of infrared light in a pair of colliding galaxies 134 million light-years away. The source turned out to be a star falling into a gigantic black hole that weighs 20 million times the mass of our sun .

While a few similar events have been seen before …