Scientists have detected a black hole that's taken a record-breaking decade to devour a star - and it's still chewing away.
The interstellar banquet is happening in a small galaxy 1.8 billion light-years from Earth and was reported on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
University of New Hampshire research scientist Dacheng Lin said other black hole feeding frenzies have been observed since the 1990s, but they've lasted just a year.
Lin and his team used data from orbiting X-ray telescopes to observe the 11 year feast watching as X-ray flares erupt while the star is swallowed and cooked millions of degrees.
"We have witnessed a star's spectacular and prolonged demise," Lin said in a statement.
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Scientists have watched the continue to grow rapidly, said the reports co-author James Guillochon from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
"This tells us something unusual - like a star twice as heavy as our Sun - is being fed into the black hole."
Based on computer models, the feasting should taper off over the next decade.
