Black holes – they suck, literally. They are gravitational abysses that consume and destroy just about anything that wanders too closely. Stars are no slouches themselves in terms of mass, which makes it rare for one to actually get close enough to a black hole to be consumed. However, scientists from MIPT and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences have scoured satellite data to find not one, but three instances of the supposedly rare event between 1990 and the 2000s.

The researchers used data collected by two satellites, ROSAT and XMM-Newton. They’re both X-ray orbiting observatories, which makes them perfect for detecting dying stars: When consumed by a black hole, stars generate ultra-bright X-ray flares, which can be detected over vast distances.

Of course, it’s not so simple. X-ray radiation is present in space everywhere and pretty much at all times, so distinguishing a star in its death throws can be difficult. Add in the fact that a star typically only passes close enough to the black hole at the center of its galaxy to be consumed once every 10,000 years, and scientists are left searching for tiny needles in an infinite hay stack.

To weed out distractions, researchers took a number of measures. For one, they were able to ignore any X-ray flares from within the Milky Way galaxy – there’s only one black hole at the center, so no stars between Earth and the galaxy’s edge could fall victim. They also looked for X-ray dimming: When a star is consumed, it doesn’t take long (just a few years) for a black hole to absorb the captured matter. Reviewing data from both the 1990s and the 2000s, then, should show significant decreases in these instances.

The data led to the identification of three X-ray sources labeled1RXS J114727.1 + 494302, 1RXS J130547.2 + 641252 and 1RXS J235424.5-102053. [1RXS means that the object was first noticed during the first survey of the sky by the ROSATtelescope, and the two six-digit numbers after the letter J are angular coordinates.]

Of course, the findings are somewhat uncertain. Astronomers hope the release of Spectrum-X-Gamma in 2016 will offer more accurate detection capabilities.