Scientists have observed a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star in a remarkably unusual event. What makes it even stranger is that this is happening in a region of space where black holes of this size aren’t normally found, thousands of light-years from where they’re expected.
A recent discovery, detailed in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, describes what happened when a star wandered too close to a black hole and was ripped apart in a powerful event called AT2024tvd.
A tidal disruption event happens when a star wanders too close to a black hole and is ripped apart by its powerful gravity. This process stretches the star into a stream of gas, which heats up and briefly shines brighter than whole galaxies. These dramatic events usually occur near the centers of galaxies, within a few light-years of the supermassive black hole at their core.
Scientists have observed a black hole destroying a star far from the usual galactic center – about 3,000 light-years away. This unusual location hints that another supermassive black hole might exist within the same galaxy. You can find more details here: 💫
— Chandra Observatory (@chandraxray) May 8, 2025
Okay, so this new black hole discovery is wild. It exploded about 2,600 light-years from the center of its galaxy, which is way further out than anything we’ve ever seen – like, 25 times farther! Seriously, that distance alone makes this event, AT2024tvd, one of the most bizarre and important things astronomers have ever tracked. It’s a real head-scratcher and could change how we understand these things.
Black hole eating star thousands of lightyears away
Scientists at UC Berkeley discovered something unusual while using the Zwicky Transient Facility to monitor the night sky for bright flashes. Initially, it appeared to be a normal dying star, but further investigation with radio telescopes revealed a strange location, turning it into a puzzling cosmic event.
“This is really remarkable,” explained Itai Sfaradi, a researcher at UC Berkeley who headed the radio observations. “We’ve never seen such strong radio signals from a star being torn apart by a black hole so far from a galaxy’s core, and these signals are changing more quickly than anything we’ve previously observed.”
Researchers think this black hole might have been thrown out of its original galaxy’s center during a crash with another galaxy, or it could have come from a completely different galaxy. This discovery could also prove that when galaxies collide, supermassive black holes can be ejected, wandering through space until they get close enough to a star to be detected.
Okay, so things got even weirder. After that first crazy event, astronomers picked up two more radio bursts! One came about 131 days later, and then another, even bigger one, just 63 days after that. It’s like the black hole was burping after its meal! Scientists think these bursts might be from the stuff the black hole is gobbling up hitting the stuff around it – kind of like a cosmic backwash. Pretty wild, right?
Scientists now think there are likely many more black holes wandering the universe that we can’t see directly. We can only find them when they become visible by violently destroying something around them.
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2025-11-02 23:49