In a first for astronomers, a black hole was observed completely swallowing a neutron star. Then, in another part of the cosmos, they saw the event happen again -- just 10 days later.

The reports were published Tuesday in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“It was just a big quick (gulp), gone,” said study co-author Patrick Brady, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee who specializes in black holes and neutron stars.

The black hole “gets a nice dinner of a neutron star and makes itself just a little bit more massive,” he said.

The event has generated plenty of attention amongst astronomers, who were fascinated by how the black hole just fully gulped a dead star. It was "like a raven devouring roadkill," according to the New York Times.

Astronomers tracked the waves in January 2020, but the first release from Astrophysical Journal Letters was on Tuesday. There were more than 100 scientists who worked on the study.

There have been reports of black holes alone colliding into one another, and neutrons colliding but this is the first time they have seen one of each crashing together. This is picked up with detectors on earth that catch gravitational waves. These waves were detected from more than one billion light-years away, none have been found in our galaxy yet.

According to NASA’s website, "a black hole is a region in space where the pulling force of gravity is so strong that light is not able to escape. The strong gravity occurs because matter has been pressed into a tiny space. Because no light can escape, black holes are invisible.”

Neutron stars are the corpse of a dead star which forms after a supernova. A star bigger than the sun gets condensed into a neutron star that can be shrunk to only 6-10 miles long.

“Neutron stars are very, very dense! A tablespoon of neutron star material would weigh more than 1 billion U.S. tons,” according to Earthsky’s report on neutron stars.

Scientists believe many more of these black-hole and neutron pairings will appear in the future.