Celestial "Pac-Man": Astronomers spot massive black holes gobbling up city-sized neutron stars for the first time

In what looks like a celestial version of "Pac-Man," scientists have detected black holes gobbling up neutron stars — marking the observation of collisions between the two most extreme objects in the universe for the very first time.

And the hefty feasts occurred one billion years ago. Within a 10-day time frame, a team of over 1,000 international scientists spotted the rare cosmic event twice using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in the U.S. and the Virgo gravitational-wave observatory in Italy, They published their findings, originally documented in January 2020, on Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.