What does it look like when a black hole eats a star?

For the non-astronomy-minded, a black hole probably isn’t something you would associate with bright light. Apparently, however, that’s exactly what one looks like while it’s consuming a star.

Astronomers got the chance to observe this phenomenon earlier this year when, on Feb. 11, they detected a distant flash of light “as bright as a quadrillion suns.” Twenty-one telescopes all over the world were able to view the event in X-ray, radio, optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. After the resulting data was analyzed, it was determined that the bright flash had been the result of a black hole energetically consuming a star that had gotten caught in its gravitational pull.

This was the first time such an event had been bright enough to be visible to the human eye. “This particular event was 100 times more powerful than the most powerful gamma-ray burst afterglow,” said Dheeraj Pasham, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It was something extraordinary.”