There’s a star that has survived the same black hole twice
In 2022, astronomers detected a flash of light coming from a distant galaxy: a star had been partially devoured by a supermassive black hole. Nothing out of the ordinary… until two years later, in 2024, the same flare appeared again, almost identical, in the same location.
The conclusion: it wasn’t a different star, and it wasn’t a coincidence. It was the same star, returning to the black hole on an elliptical orbit, losing another piece of itself with each close pass. Scientists nicknamed the case “the unluckiest star in the universe” (AT 2022dbl).
What makes this discovery so important is that it changes what we thought we knew about these phenomena: for a decade, many similar flares were interpreted as the total destruction of a star. Now we know that, in many cases, it could just be the first “bite” in a repeating series — the star doesn’t die in one blow, but slowly agonizes, orbit after orbit.
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