Los Angeles ? Astronomers reported Wednesday the first strong evidence of a supermassive black hole stretching, tearing apart and partially gobbling up a star.

The event had long been predicted by theory but never confirmed.

“This is really fantastic stuff. This is one of the Holy Grails of astronomy,” said astronomer Alex Filippenko of the University of California at Berkeley.

A powerful X-ray blast drew the attention of astronomers to the event, located near the center of an otherwise inconspicuous galaxy called RX J1242-11. The galaxy is about 700 million light-years from Earth.

The international team of astronomers believes the blast was produced as debris from the destroyed star was sucked into the black hole.

“The last cry of help before the matter falls into the black hole is radiated in X-rays, which we have detected,” said Gunther Hasinger, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

The resulting flare was thousands of times brighter than all of the billions of other stars in the galaxy, astronomers said during a NASA news conference broadcast from Washington.

A black hole is a massive but unseen celestial object that has such an intense gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape from it.

This particularly black hole is estimated to have a mass 100 million times that of the sun. Astronomers said an unlucky star about the size of our sun neared the black hole after veering off course following a close encounter with another star.

The tremendous gravity of the black hole stretched the star, ripping it apart in perhaps just hours or days.