Gulp. Burp.

And so it goes in the cruel and carnivorous universe according to Einstein.

Astronomers said on Thursday that they had seen a giant black hole in a nearby galaxy rip apart an unfortunate wayward star and spread half of it into a messy blaze of light and heat swirling toward doom. The other half was spit outward, partly in a fiery high-energy jet at a quarter of the speed of light.

All this happened out of human sight, deep in the dusty heart of a pair of colliding galaxies known collectively as Arp 299, about 150 million light years from here in the constellation Ursa Major. An international team of astronomers, led by Seppo Mattila of the University of Turku in Finland and Miguel Perez-Torres of the Astrophysical Institute of Andalusia in Spain, teased out the story of what happened from observations of infrared, or heat, radiation and radio waves that can penetrate the dust and leak out to the rest of the universe. They published their report Thursday in the journal Science.

Black holes are gravitational pits, trap doors to eternity, predicted by Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity. They are so deep and dense that nothing, not even light can escape them. Every galaxy seems to have a supersize version of one of these monsters squatting at its core. The black hole in the center of one of the colliding lobes in Arp 299 has the mass of about 20 million suns.