Astronomers Detect Orphan Supermassive Black Hole Devouring Star

Astronomers Detect Orphan Supermassive Black Hole Devouring Star

The phenomenon, known as a tidal disruption event, happens when a star drifts too close to a monster black hole and is torn apart by extreme gravitational forces. The black hole behind the blast weighs in at about a million times the mass of the Sun. At its peak, the stellar death emitted the luminosity of around 10 billion suns, and its ultraviolet light even outshone the host galaxy for months, as detailed by popsci.com. NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory space telescope also measured the temperature of the event at 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Discovery via AI Algorithm and Zwicky Transient Facility

The existence of the event was first flagged in November 2025 as an unusual brightening in a galaxy about 750 million light-years away by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a survey conducted by the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. ZTF scans the entire northern sky every two days, detecting roughly half a million flashes each night. To find this candidate, researchers used a recently developed intelligent algorithm to automatically recognize a flare resembling a tidal disruption event outside of a galactic core, according to Gizmodo.

Out of the half million flashes ZTF detects each night, our new artificial intelligence algorithm automatically recognized a flare that looked a lot like a tidal disruption event, despite its unusual location in the outskirts of a galaxy, said Robert Stein, a research fellow at The University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. A paper describing the results, led by Stein, was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Context and Origins of Wandering Black Holes

Astronomical surveys typically spot about 30 tidal disruption events across the universe each year, but prior to recent findings, they had only ever been observed in galaxy cores. That changed when scientists previously saw a star being shredded 2,600 light-years from the center of its host galaxy, inspiring researchers to look further out. The newly identified black hole now pushes that distance to more than 30,000 light-years.

Researchers have outlined two primary scenarios for how the black hole ended up so far from a galactic center. In one scenario, the object originated in a small dwarf galaxy that merged with the larger galaxy seen today. Alternatively, three or more galaxies may have merged together, and a gravitational tug-of-war between their supermassive black holes could have flung the lightest black hole out to the edge of the galaxy.