Astronomers find black hole's favorite snack: 'The star appears to be living to die another day'

An illustration of a black hole at the top of the screen and a white orb getting ripped apart toward the bottom.

Astronomers have succeeded in forecasting the meal timings of a colossal black hole after watching it devour a nearby star in bits and pieces, they announced earlier this week, marking a step forward in understanding the elusive eating behavior of these cosmic voids.

The data behind the forecasts was beamed home in 2018, when an automated ground-based survey flagged a surge in brightness from a galaxy roughly 860 million light-years from Earth. The flare-up — which can be likened to turning on a cosmic light switch billions of times brighter than our sun — pointed to a star being shredded and consumed by a supermassive black hole, which lurks in the center of a faraway galaxy and weighs roughly 50 million times our sun.