With everything else that has been going on lately down here on this planet, you might not have noticed that there has been a lot of news lately about black holes, those Einsteinian monsters that can swallow light and everything else, behaving badly. Black holes eating stars, or whole gangs of them. Black holes burping energy from the centers of galaxies. Black holes banging together in universe-shaking events.

It sounds like cosmology according to Stephen King. Over the summer I was on a lake in Peru, where the water was boiling with feeding piranha, their little black fins furiously breaking the surface. I was safe in the boat. Then.

Turns out that it has been Black Hole Week, complete with its own hashtag, according to NASA. “I think they wanted to highlight all of the black-hole work that NASA telescopes have done and are doing, and combine it into a weeklong social-media event,” Peter Edmonds, a spokesman for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, wrote in an email.

Indeed, telescopes on the ground and in space, scanning the sky in everything from X-rays to radio waves, have combined to tell some scary stories. Here are a few to get you in the mood.