Holy shit, Muse fans! A supermassive black hole just ate a star

As a black hole in Arp 299 swallows a star twice the size of our own, we hope no more Muse lyrics come true.

If Muse are on the lookout for their next stadium production concept, they need look no further than Arp 299, a mere 150 million light years away. Here, two galaxies are busy colliding in the celestial equivalent of Ant McPartlin popping down the shops, and the supermassive black hole at the centre of one of them was witnessed swallowing an entire star twice the size of our own.

It was the first time astronomers had literally witnessed a “superstar sucked into a super massive”, and recorded the resulting flumes of material blasted out into space. And, while we try not to think about the noble and advanced civilisations that were probably annihilated, from NASA’s reconstruction video it looks like exactly the sort of thing you could imagine Matt Bellamy sitting in to pump out the ‘Plug In Baby’ riff, or being turned into a floating inflatable with an acrobat hanging off it. But as we imagine this hanging over Wembley Stadium, let’s all pray that no more Muse lyrics come true, although ‘Apocalypse Please’ is starting to sound more like a Newsnight report every day…

 

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