A brilliant flash in the heavens was generated by a black hole half a billion times more massive than the Sun.

The flash, detected in 2015 in a galaxy about 1.2 billion parsecs from Earth, was originally described as the brightest exploding star ever seen. But Thomas Krühler at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and his colleagues argued that the flash was actually the death throes of a star being shredded by a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. Now, they reveal findings that bolster their theory.

Analysis of the galaxy’s gas suggests that it was ionized by radiation emitted as the black hole gobbled up matter over millions of years. The team also found that some of the galaxy’s properties, such as the age of its central stars, are similar to those of other galaxies where scientists have caught black holes in the act of consuming matter.