At the center of the Milky Way sits a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*, and it has been feeding on nearby stars for a very long time.That alone would be unsettling enough. But there’s something else moving around near it, and it happens to be one of the most extreme objects in the known universe.Only one of them survives the encounter, and it isn’t the one you’d expect from the name.The second giant is a magnetar, which is what remains after a truly enormous star dies.Here’s how one gets made. A star at least eight times more massive than our Sun reaches the end of its life and explodes in a supernova. Most of it disperses, but the dense core survives.Usually those cores become neutron stars, spinning a few times per second and composed almost entirely of neutrons.Some develop magnetic fields powerful enough to emit electromagnetic radiation from their poles, which makes them pulsars, observable through a telescope whenever those poles happen to face Earth.And a small number of those go further still.They become magnetars, the strongest magnets in the universe. They rotate more slowly, roughly once every ten seconds, while carrying a magnetic field a hundred times stronger than a neutron star’s.Bring one halfway between the Earth and the Moon and the results would be catastrophic. Even at a distance of 26 light years, it would still be a serious problem.So what happens when something that powerful meets a supermassive black hole?The answer is quieter than you’d imagine. No explosion, no dramatic flash. Just a slow cosmic merger unfolding across billions of years.And the magnetar loses.For all its magnetic strength, it has no answer to a black hole. Depending on its trajectory and the relative mass of both objects, it would either be swallowed whole or torn apart gradually, piece by piece.While that happened, the magnetar would send gravitational waves rolling out across the universe, distorting the curvature of spacetime as it went.Then it would be gone, and the black hole would be slightly larger than before.That’s the part with real consequences. Every meal expands the event horizon, and a wider event horizon reaches further, pulling in more stars that would otherwise have stayed clear.Sagittarius A* may already have a history of consuming neutron stars.Follow that process far enough forward and the endpoint becomes hard to argue with. After quadrillions of years of steady consumption, the black hole at the center could take the entire Milky Way, star by star.By then humanity would be a very distant memory, which is probably for the best.