The event occurred 8,550 million trillion kilometres away from Earth and was picked up by gravitational-wave detectors in Italy and US. The detectors, named LIGO and Virgo, observed ripples in space and time, which is believed to be a black hole eating a neutron star. The violent event is thought to have happened approximately 900 million years ago.
A video show an artist’s depiction of a black hole swallowing star, and explains that the masses of the two objects are still being “precisely determined”.
Gravitational waves are disturbances in the curvature of spacetime and are thought to be created by an object accelerating.
A neutron star is the collapsed core of a giant star, essentially made from the protons and electrons melting into each other to form neutrons.
The dense stars have a mass about 1.4 times that of the Sun.
READ MORE: NASA footage shows black hole CONSUME a star in ‘tidal disruption’
Susan Scott, leader of the General Relativity Theory and Data Analysis Group at Australian National University, said: “About 900 million years ago, this black hole ate a very dense star, known as a neutron star, like Pac-man -possibly snuffing out the star instantly.
“The ANU SkyMapper Telescope responded to the detection alert and scanned the entire likely region of space where the event occurred, but we’ve not found any visual confirmation.”
The Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery added: “We have always thought that there should be binary systems of a black hole and a neutron star circling each other out in space.
“So if this event is confirmed, it would be the first evidence that such systems do actually exist, and that some of them are spiralling closer and closer and eventually smashing together.
The discovery was revealed on Saturday by NASA astronomer Tuan Do who tweeted a timelapse of his observation of the supermassive black hole in May.
Mr Do, an astronomer at UCLA, wrote: ”Here’s a timelapse of images over 2.5 hr from May from @keckobservatory of the supermassive black hole Sgr A*.
“The black hole is always variable, but this was the brightest we’ve seen in the infrared so far. It was probably even brighter before we started observing that night!”
The black hole, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is situated in the middle of the Milky Way, just 26,000 light-years from Earth, according to NASA.
Scientists observing the black hole for four days in April and May of this year using the Keck II Telescope in Hawaii saw the event.
Black holes are one of the most extreme entities in the universe. These mysterious regions of space-time exhibit such power that nothing – even light can’t escape from their grasp.
Once a black hole begins devouring nearby gas clouds and stars, material sucked inside heats up at the event horizon.
