Astronomers Witness Black Hole Feasting on a Star Nearby
WHO:
ABC News - NASA captured the event.
ABC News - Robert Stein, a research fellow at The University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, commented on the discovery.
ABC News - Jonathan Carney, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provided insights on the data.
Gizmodo - Sylvain Veilleux, an astronomy professor at the University of Maryland, discussed the implications of the discovery.
Gizmodo - Suvi Gezari, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, commented on the significance of the finding.
WHAT:
ABC News - The discovery is the first optical tidal disruption event (TDE) observed in the outskirts of a host galaxy.
Gizmodo - The black hole is located about 30,000 light-years away from the center of its galaxy.
Gizmodo - The black hole has a mass comparable to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which is around four million times the mass of the Sun.
ABC News - The TDE was so bright that it outshone its entire host galaxy in ultraviolet wavelengths for months.
Gizmodo - A TDE occurs when a star passes fatally close to a supermassive black hole, which pulls it apart and unleashes an ultrabright flare.
Gizmodo - A star will drift too close to a supermassive black hole about once every 100,000 years.
ABC News - Astronomers captured an image of a black hole "devouring" a star, known as a tidal disruption event (TDE).
ABC News - The black hole involved weighs about a million times as much as the sun.
ABC News - The TDE radiated with the light of about 10 billion suns.
Gizmodo - The event was detected as a bright flash of light indicating a supermassive black hole consuming a star.
Gizmodo - Astronomical surveys typically spot around 30 tidal disruption events each year.
WHERE:
ABC News - The black hole is located about 750 million light-years away from Earth.
ABC News - The TDE was observed about 30,000 light-years away from the center of its host galaxy.
Gizmodo - The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is located at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.
Gizmodo - Follow-up observations were conducted using the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope in Chile.
WHEN:
ABC News - The unusual brightening was first detected in November 2025.
ABC News - The TDE was discovered in May 2025.
WHY:
Gizmodo - The black hole likely originated from a galaxy's center but was displaced due to a merger with another galaxy.
Gizmodo - The black hole likely originated in the aftermath of a violent collision between two galaxies.
ABC News - The black hole is described as "orphan" or "wandering" because it is located on the outskirts of a galaxy rather than at its center.
ABC News - The researchers theorize the black hole's location may be due to a merger of multiple galaxies or a dwarf galaxy merging with a larger one.
HOW:
ABC News - The researchers developed an intelligent algorithm to identify TDEs from the half million flashes detected each night by the Zwicky Transient Facility.
Gizmodo - The researchers developed an intelligent algorithm to come through the hundreds of thousands of celestial events detected by the ZTF.
ABC News - An artificial intelligence algorithm was developed to recognize the flare that resembled a TDE from the half million flashes detected each night by the ZTF.
ABC News - The researchers used multiple telescopes, including the SOAR telescope and NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, to confirm the existence of the TDE.
(UPDATED July 29, 2026 15:37 UTC)
Researchers have made a groundbreaking discovery by observing the first optical tidal disruption event in the outskirts of a host galaxy, revealing a black hole located about 30,000 light-years from the galaxy's center. This black hole has a mass comparable to the one at the center of the Milky Way, weighing in at around four million times that of the Sun, and is believed to have been displaced from the galaxy's center due to a merger with another galaxy. To identify these tidal disruption events, scientists developed an intelligent algorithm that analyzes the half million flashes detected each night by the Zwicky Transient Facility.
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(UPDATED July 29, 2026 13:33 UTC)
A recent astronomical event known as a tidal disruption event, or TDE, has captivated scientists as it was so bright that it outshone its entire host galaxy in ultraviolet wavelengths for months. This phenomenon occurs when a star drifts too close to a supermassive black hole, which pulls it apart and unleashes an ultrabright flare, with such encounters happening roughly once every 100,000 years. Researchers utilized an intelligent algorithm to sift through the hundreds of thousands of celestial events detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility to identify this extraordinary occurrence, which likely resulted from a violent collision between two galaxies.
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(UPDATED July 29, 2026 10:56 UTC)
Astronomers have captured a stunning image of a black hole, weighing about a million times more than the sun, devouring a star in a tidal disruption event, which radiated with the light of about 10 billion suns. This extraordinary event, detected as a bright flash of light, is located approximately 750 million light-years away from Earth and was first observed in November 2025. Researchers utilized an artificial intelligence algorithm alongside multiple telescopes, including the SOAR telescope in Chile, to confirm the existence of this "orphan" black hole, which may have been displaced due to a merger of galaxies.