This does NOT mean that anything ever actually lived there. But it is the first time that the ingredients for the evolution of microbial life, and the correct conditions to support it, have been directly observed beyond Earth. Mars still has water frozen at its poles, and once had quite a bit of water above and below the surface.

The black hole in question resides 60 million light years away at the centre of the NGC 1365 spiral galaxy, is a mind-boggling 3.2 million kilometres in diameter, has a mass two million times that of our Sun and is spinning at a rather impressive 1.08 billion km/h. Astronomers can now say this with confidence, after combining the efforts of Nasa's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (Nustar) — which measures high-energy X-rays — and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, which measures low-energy X-rays.

But this star, called HD 34989 (among other alphanumeric designations) is special. For one thing, it's massive, probably 10 times the mass of our Sun. It's also incredibly luminous, shining 15,000 times brighter than the Sun. Put that in the center of our solar system, and the global warming we're experiencing now would seem like the deep freeze. Happily, it's over a thousand light years away.