Astronomers have captured a rare tidal disruption event involving an orphan black hole devouring a star 750 million light-years from Earth. Detected in November 2025 using an automated artificial intelligence algorithm, the ultrabright flare outshone its host galaxy in ultraviolet wavelengths, providing a new method to find wandering supermassive black holes.
A team of researchers has caught a massive black hole shredding a nearby star on the outskirts of a distant galaxy. The phenomenon, known scientifically as a tidal disruption event, was captured by astronomers and detailed in a paper published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The central entity involved is an “orphan” or “wandering” black hole resting roughly 30,000 light-years away from the center of its host galaxy, a departure from the typical galactic core locations where such massive bodies usually reside.
Detection by Artificial Intelligence at the Palomar Observatory
The discovery began in November 2025 when the Zwicky Transient Facility, a survey conducted at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California, registered an unusual brightening in the sky. Faced with processing half a million flashes each night, a new artificial intelligence algorithm automatically recognized a flare mirroring the characteristics of a tidal disruption event, according to Robert Stein, a research fellow at The University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Jonathan Carney, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, took the first spectra that supported the flare’s interpretation as a TDE, according to NASA. Carney captured the initial spectra that supported interpreting the flare as a tidal disruption. To verify the finding, researchers gathered additional observations using the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope in Chile and NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory satellite.
The combination of all this data helped us rule out other explanations and confidently say it's a tidal disruption event, despite its strange location, Jonathan Carney
Physical Scale and Galactic Theories
The monster black hole at the center of the event weighs approximately a million times as much as the sun and sits about 750 million light-years away from Earth, NASA noted. When a star drifts fatally close—an occurrence estimated to happen about once every 100,000 years, the space agency said—the supermassive black hole’s intense gravity overcomes the star’s own gravity, pulling it apart and unleashing an ultrabright flare.
In this instance, the flare proved so intense that it outshone its entire host galaxy in ultraviolet wavelengths for months, temporarily radiating with the light of about 10 billion suns, according to NASA. This is the first optical TDE discovered in the outskirts of a host galaxy, according to the paper.
The researchers theorize that the black hole ended up so far from the galaxy’s center due to one of two possibilities:
- It may have resulted from the merger of multiple galaxies, when three or more galaxies may have merged together and the gravitational tug-of-war between their central supermassive black holes may have flung the lightest black hole out to the galaxy’s edge — in this case about 30,000 light-years away from the center, according to NASA.
- The other possibility is that a dwarf galaxy is still in the process of merging with the larger one, and a star drifted too close to the dwarf’s own supermassive black hole as its stars were pulled inward.
Validating a New Technique to Hunt Hidden Black Holes
Prior to 2024, astronomers had witnessed tidal disruption events exclusively within galaxy centers, primarily because that’s the only place researchers were looking for them, according to the space agency. Scientists have been scouring millions of galaxies looking for orphan black holes, NASA said. However, once astronomers witnessed the “tell-tale” signs of a star-shredding event happening about 2,600 light-years away from the center of its host galaxy in May 2025, it inspired more research for similar events outside the galaxy core.
“We were looking for these star-shredding events as a way to find otherwise invisible supermassive black holes wandering away from the galactic cores where they usually reside,” Stein said. “With this discovery, which is one of just a couple that have been confirmed so far, we’ve validated a new technique and can use it to hunt for more.”
Robert Stein, research fellow at The University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Parallel to observations of active black holes feeding on stars, NASA scientists may have found the “ghost” of an exploded star near the Milky Way’s black hole. June 23, 2026 / 18:13 IST NASA’s Chandra Observatory discovered the ancient supernova remnant could be over 1,700 years old and still expanding.
