An orrery of black holes ...

An orrery of black holes, courtesy NASA, shows what happens when stars gets too close to its neighbor.

A new video from NASA shows what it looks like when a star is caught in the powerful gravity of a black hole. In these binary systems, the doomed stars spin around the black holes, which steadily suck up gas from them. The visualization illustrates the variety of these parasitic partnerships in our galactic backyard, including some particularly extreme examples—like MAXI J1659, in which the star completes a full orbit every 2.4 hours.

NASA showcases 22 of these systems, located either in our own Milky Way or in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a next-door galaxy that is around 160,000 light-years from Earth.