This is a bit of a brief background on the phenomenon as observed by astronomers previously:

Scientists have seen black holes swallowing stars before and they’ve also seperately detected these mysterious jets of matter blasting out, but until now no one had been fast enough with their telescopes to link the two events, and were never able to witness them occurring in sequence.

“These events are extremely rare,” said lead researcher Sjoert van Velzen from Johns Hopkins University. “It’s the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months.”

“The destruction of a star by a black hole is beautifully complicated, and far from understood,” said van Velzen. “From our observations, we learn the streams of stellar debris can organise and make a jet rather quickly, which is valuable input for constructing a complete theory of these events.”

Wow…2015 has been quite a year for astronomy.  It seems like the more you think you know, the more you don’t know.  Congrats to the team for their work.

thanks to sciencealert.com for the great info

thanks to NASA for the pic

And this is a very cool video by Nova on black holes and some of their properties with very cool visuals.