Black hole (event horizon)
Bound debris (falls back)
Unbound debris (escapes)
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When a star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole, the black hole's gravity pulls harder on the near side of the star than the far side. Once that differential force — the tidal force — overwhelms the star's self-gravity at the tidal radius, the star is stretched into a long stream of debris rather than swallowed whole. This simulation integrates thousands of debris particles under real Newtonian gravity as a star crosses pericenter, splits into roughly equal bound and unbound halves, and shows the bound half raining back onto the black hole with a mass fallback rate that follows the famous t^-5/3 power law used to identify real TDEs in telescope survey data.