Have the laws of nature gone down the rabbit hole? Black holes are lurking at the center of most galaxies… and they’re always hungry.

They are the most powerful hunters in the universe. For billions of years they have been lurking in the blackness of space. They confound our understanding of the laws of nature. And no matter if it’s an asteroid, a planet, or a whole sun— anything that g

Whenever a star suddenly seems to be in a great hurry, there can be one of two explanations: Either it has come too close to the explosion of a neighboring sun and was violently pushed away—barnard’s star reached a record speed of more than 300,000 miles per hour as a result of such an event—or it came too close to the greatest predator in the whole universe: a black hole that’s been lying hidden in the vast darkness of the galaxy for billions of years, a greedy fiend that mercilessly devours anything that comes too close to it. For such a star there is no escape: Proximity to the ravenous mass monster results in the dramatic end of the star’s ill-fated existence— even as it races along at more than 870,000 miles per hour… But from where do the sinister star eaters draw such intense power to tear even entire solar systems to pieces?

STAR HUNTERS

The frightening fact is: Black holes are true serial killers. In essence, black holes are always swallowing something. Take, for instance, the black hole that’s sitting at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy: Sagittarius A* is supermassive, weighing 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun. And it has a tremendous appetite, regularly indulging in its favorite meal of a star with planets, asteroids, and gas clouds for its dessert. Sagittarius A* is approximately 11.4 billion years old, so this insatiable hunter has probably eaten hundreds of thousands of stars throughout its lifetime.