Black Holes are one of the most fascinating objects in the universe. It is an object so dense that not even light can escape it’s gravity(hence the “black” part). This may not seem too interesting to someone who isn’t well versed in Physics, but to those who know, the speed of the light is the speed limit of the universe. Nothing can travel faster than light, so once something goes near enough to the black hole, thats the end, no coming back. On top of just being cool over the past 20 years or so we are coming to learn that there is a black hole at the center of almost every galaxy. Not your average stellar mass black hole either. These objects are millions of times more massive than our own sun. Since stars are basically capped at 100 times as massive as the sun, there has long been some debate as to how these massive objects formed. The leading theory is that they simply gobbled up stars around them, and now supercomputers are helping scientists to understand just how such a mighty black hole quenches its thirst. By studying flares of light at the center of distant galaxies, scientists are now starting the understand the processes of which stars that stray too close to the galactic center are destroyed. Because Black Holes by nature produce no light, they are impossible to study unless they interact with something else. Even when they do it, there is so much going on that the calculations would be far too hard for a human to carry our, that’s where supercomputers come in. By using the new computers, scientists are able to consider all the variables in the complicated that is the extreme tidal forces of the Black Hole first ripping apart and then consuming the star. 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140414150848.htm