When a star gets too close to a black hole, gravity tears it apart like dough in a mixer whisk. The flare AT2018cqh in a dwarf galaxy built up over 550 days and then froze in an X-ray glow. Analysis of spectra and brightness revealed: this is the work of a middleweight black hole — tens of thousands of times heavier than the Sun. Such objects are extremely rare and fill the gap between small and supermassive black holes. The most surprising part: these "seeds" might have grown into the giants that shine at the centers of galaxies today. The flare AT2018cqh not only flushed out a stealthy black hole, but also confirmed that the "stellar shredding" method is effective for hunting down the missing link.
Intermediate-mass black holes could have been the "seeds" from which supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies grew.
In the movie "Interstellar," the characters dive into a wormhole, but if their ship had gotten too close to a black hole, it would have met the same fate: tidal forces would have stretched and torn it into cosmic spaghetti.