Once each 10,000 years, a star is torn

Astronomers report having observed a super massive black hole in a galaxy some 500 million light years away get torn apart.

Literally.

This rare finding is that more intriguing in that it is said to take place just once every 10,000 years per galaxy. A paper describing the discovery will be published in the Astrophysics Journal. A group of astronomers actually came upon the discovery in 2006, but then spent several years going over documentary footage provided by the European Space Agency's X-ray telescope. ''We've been pretty lucky,'' Sydney University astrophysicist Sean Farrell told the university's press office. ''We had indeed stumbled on to a very rare extreme event ... we were very lucky that the telescope happened to have this event in its field of view.''

Although Alfred Einstein predicted the existence of super massive black holes, not much is known about them.