Thanks to research involving a neutrino space odyssey, a black hole devouring the sun, and an IceCube, we now know a little bit more about the cosmos.

The ghost of a star in the form of an elusive neutrino particle flung from the debris of a black hole that devoured a star was detected by researchers. The neutrino is the first ever to be discovered from this kind of event, which suggests that the celestial collision also acted as a gargantuan cosmic particle accelerator.

In a paper published by the researchers in Nature Astronomy, they estimate that the carnivorous black hole was about as big as 30 million suns and that the immense gravitational pull is what caught the sun and pulled it in. However, the force across the star was uneven, which lead to a distorted shape and eventual disintegration of it. “This difference is called a tidal force, and as the star gets closer, this stretching becomes more extreme. Eventually, it rips the star apart, and then we call it a tidal disruption event. It’s the same process that leads to ocean tides on Earth, but luckily for us the moon doesn’t pull hard enough to shred the Earth.”