Sometimes astronomy reads like Gothic horror at the grandest possible scale. For instance, scientists spotted new evidence of a black hole destroying a nearby star.
It's solid science, but think of how it must have looked, with a dark hole in space slowly devouring a shining sun. Or read how this reporter relishes the story, like a cross between crime thriller, space opera, and Lovecraftian horror:
Supermassive black holes... lurk in the centers of most galaxies. These hefty monsters lay quietly until an unsuspecting victim, such as a star, wanders close enough to get ripped apart by their powerful gravitational clutches.
Astronomers have spotted these stellar homicides before, but this is the first time they identified the victim.
"It is like we are gathering evidence from a crime scene. Because there is very little hydrogen and mostly helium in the gas, we detect from the carnage that the slaughtered star had to have been the helium-rich core of a stripped star."
It is not the first time the unlucky star had a brush with the behemoth black hole.
The stellar remains continued its journey around the center, until it ventured even closer to the black hole to face its ultimate demise.
And this final, supremely sad vista:
Astronomers predict stripped stars circle the central black hole of our Milky Way galaxy. These close encounters are rare, occurring roughly every 100,000 years.
Which reminds me of Lovecrat's "Nemesis":
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.