Around 30,000 light-years from the center of its galaxy, a “wandering” supermassive black hole has torn apart a star. It is the farthest-from-the-core event of its kind ever observed.
What happened
When a star strays too close to a black hole, tidal forces rip it apart – astronomers call this a tidal disruption event (TDE). The Zwicky Transient Facility in California spotted the flare in November 2025 in a galaxy roughly 750 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus. NASA’s Swift Observatory and the SOAR telescope in Chile confirmed the find.
The numbers
- The black hole weighs in at around one million solar masses.
- In ultraviolet light, the event briefly outshone the entire galaxy – “radiating with the light of about 10 billion suns”.
- The temperature reached about 30,000 degrees Celsius.
The offset is what makes it remarkable: it is the largest distance from a galactic core ever measured for an optically discovered TDE. Such events open up a new method for tracking down otherwise invisible black holes that have “wandered” away from galactic centers.
