The term for this gruesome process is actually " spaghettification ," according to NASA, inspired by Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time. In it, the late theoretical physicist first described what would happen to a person approaching a black hole's " event horizon " — its point of no return — in space.

A pair of galaxies whose light has traveled for 8.3 billion years contains what astronomers believe is a supermassive black hole in the act of forming. If this is the case, it is the first time we have seen this process in action, a vital and unprecedented piece of the supermassive black hole formation puzzle.