I’d like to provide some additional details on the movies generated for the press release, for those who are curious. The disruption shown is that of a star whose mass is less centrally concentrated than that of the Sun; this is more consistent with the hypothesis that this object is partially supported by degeneracy pressure. Also, the disruption simulation was performed assuming a $10^3:1$ mass ratio, whereas the actual disruption was likely to be $>10^6:1$. This was done to be able to follow the fallback of material, as the larger the mass ratio, the longer this takes as compared to the time of the disruption itself. The dynamics of the disruption, and all of the qualitative effects seen in the video, should be similar to what is seen in the video, but the relative scales of the features to one another (for instance, the width of the stream as compared to the distance of the stream to the black hole) will be different for more reasonable mass ratios.

The question of whether the star that was disrupted is indeed the core of a red giant (as proposed by the authors) remains, in my opinion, unanswered, as there are other He-rich stars that may be capable of producing a similar flare. This question can only be addressed by our improving our models of stellar disruption, which our group is very busily doing.

I had been pleading, unsuccessfully, for Google to fix this issue, as well as many other scientists who use ArXiv daily. The latest post in the thread by Zhiyu Zhang brought up the fact that if you use the German mirror de.arxiv.org, the PDF files are properly tagged again.

This led me to make a change to Vox Charta’s ArXiv links, which now automatically point to de.arxiv.org if it detects the user is using Chrome. Also, I found that through ADS’ preferences that you can change your ArXiv mirror preference to the German mirror, ensuring that all ArXiv links point to this mirror. These changes completely solve the problem for me.

Update: I later learned that the APS mirror also handles PDFs correctly. This is probably a better option for those residing in the United States.

All of the new videos were uploaded to YouTube, which is widely compatible across all platforms and should hopefully play on most semi-modern computers. If you are having issues with playing the YouTube videos, you can downgrade the video quality to 480p or lower to achieve a better frame-rate. The movies posted previously from my other projects still require Quicktime, but I plan to export most of those to YouTube in the coming few days.

If you are interested in seeing what the collisions look like, I have just posted some movies from the simulations we performed in FLASH to the WD collisions project page. Check them out!