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(CNN) — Nearly a billion years ago, two of the most extreme objects in the universe came together in a death spiral, and one of them didn't make it out alive.
For the first time ever, astronomers have detected two separate instances of black holes swallowing dense neutron stars -- and it played out like Pac-Man in space.
The gravitational waves caused by these two events reached Earth in January 2020, allowing astronomers to retrace the ripples in space-time back to when they occurred in distant galaxies 900 million light-years and a billion light-years away.
The study, involving more than a thousand scientists in these detections, published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.