If you were to go outside on a clear night, equipped with only a moderately powerful backyard telescope, you could spot something that has perplexed physicists for centuries: a black hole.

The black hole in question is nearly 8,000 light-years away, in the Cygnus constellation, and normally would be invisible, except this particular black hole has quite the appetite. It's swallowing nearby stars and emitting flashes of light in the process.

But wait, aren't black holes all-consuming? How can any light be visible? Technically that's true, but what we can now see is light emitted by what's called being sucked into the black hole. It's this byproduct of the black hole's consumption of a nearby star thatand recently described in the journal Nature.

"Apparently, ,” Eric Schlegel of the University of Texas in San Antonio told The Guardian. “It is common for big black holes to expel gas outward, but rare to have such a close, resolved view of these events.”

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As the black hole sucks in the star, it , Phys.org reports. The hotter the X-rays are, the more likely they are to heat up the surrounding area, known as the accretion disk, and make it glow.

"We find that activity in the vicinity of a black hole can be observed in optical light at low luminosity for the first time," Mariko Kimura, the study's lead author, told Space.com. "These findings suggest that we can study physical phenomena that occur in the vicinity of the black hole without high-spec X-ray or gamma-ray telescopes."

"Stars can only be observed after dark, and there are only so many hours each night, but by making observations from different locations around the globe we're able to take more comprehensive data," the study's co-author Daisuke Nogami told Phys.org. "We're very pleased that our international observation network was able to come together to document this rare event."

And now you can be a part of the experience, too. All you need is an 7-inch telescope.

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“The Milky Way Over Turret Arch” submitted by Ron Risman